I had to study abroad in the Czech Republic to learn how to tramp like an American: riding rattletrap trains into the countryside, following the footpaths that crisscross the forests and farmlands, and sleeping under the stars beside the dying embers of a fire. The old Bohemian towns were never more than a day's walk from one another so we could (and did) get colossally lost, but we were always close enough to sausages, apples, and bars, where we filled plastic jugs with beer before stomping into the cool twilight.
We didn't realize that Czech tramping predated WWII, and we definitely didn't realize that it was inspired by early American cowboy movies and novels by Karl May, a German romanticizer of the American West. Self-styled tramps (who sometimes dressed like cowboys and Indians) joined the Czech resistance against the Nazisâsome, working in armaments factories, famously mislabeled boxes so German troops would get wrong-sized bullets. VĂĄclav Havel wrote about tramps rearranging street signs to confuse the Soviet troops who invaded in 1968. They had come to squelch the Prague Spring, a brief season of liberalization under president Dubcek's program of "socialism with a human face." Novelists and filmmakers (like Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, and Milos Forman) were fooling around with satire, surrealism, and other forbidden bourgeois treats, offending the party leadership in Moscow.
Filmed in 1964âfour years before Brezhnev sent in the tanksâLemonade Joe is an homage to and satire of American westerns. The musical (and slightly absurdist) comedy opens with an extended bar brawl set to plunking piano, where cowboys deliver flying kung-fu kicks, crack eggs over each other's heads, and knee each other's faces in time to the music. A father-daughter temperance team comes a-proselytizing, are attacked by the drunks, and then rescued by Lemonade Joe, the sharpshooting, ballad-singing, teetotaling cowboy. "Alcohol is bad for the constitution," he tells the awed drunks after dropping a bully's pants by shooting his belt off. "And especially for accurate aim." Converted, the cowboys pile into the father-daughter bar (which only stocks Kolaloka-brand lemonade) and the rest of the film is a battle for customers. Director Oldrich Lipsky loves the conventions of American westerns well enough to skewer them: Once the townspeople switch to the salubrious practice of drinking lemonade, their aim does improve, and the city's murder rate skyrockets, to the delight of a ghoulish undertaker. There are animated tracers so we can watch sharpshooters deflect bullets, some unexpected surf rock, and a villain who disguises himself in blackface and a white tux for an extended trumpet solo.
By the end, Lemonade Joe has become an elaborate origins mythâwith gunfights, love stories, and unexpected alliancesâabout the derivation of WhisKola, an alcoholic/nonalcoholic lemonade "for alcoholics and teetotalers." That may be an obligatory socialist dig at the American entrepreneurial habit of trumping logic and principles. Or it might just be a weird joke. It's hard to tell.
