Lemonade Joe

Lemonade Joe, 1964
Director: Oldrich Lipský; 99 min, Czech, Black and White
Actors: Karel Fiala, Milos Kopecký, Kveta Fialová, Olga Schoberová

On the face of it, a “singing-cowboy western” and an homage to the “horse-opera” genre embodied in the original Czech title (Limonádový Joe aneb Konská opera), Lemonade Joe is an intelligent yet seemingly prankish send-up of the “American western” and a jab at “American commercialism” that was produced in Czechoslovakia at a time when any film that aspired to New Wave-style social criticism had to be very circumspect indeed. Joe is a “clean-livin’” gunman who drinks nothing but “Kola Loka Lemonade” and it’s his mission to rid the town of whisky-guzzling cowboys. At the end of this musical-comedy parody of silent westerns (including lovingly-rendered sepia tones and comically speeded-up bar brawls), heroes and villains join forces. It turns out that everything that’s transpired was for the sake of the Kola Loka company, whose concern was not saving the town’s morals but simply getting rid of the beverage’s competitor – whisky