‘Lemonade Joe’ or — The Most Beautiful Bar Fight Ever Filmed?
Oldřich Lipský’s ‘Lemonade Joe’ (1964) is a pretty heady cocktail of a movie. How heady? Imagine a spoof Western mixed with social and political satire, innovative editing techniques, musical numbers, silent comedy, animation, surrealism, visual trickery, sonic gags, ridiculous stunt-work and you might come close to getting an idea of how much of a wallop this lemonade packs. It’s like Guy Maddin had directed ‘Blazing Saddles’ (1974).
It’s just an average night at the Trigger Whisky Saloon in Stetson City, Arizona, as the gunmen drink, fight, fight, drink and fight whilst Tornado Lou serenades them with her songs under the watchful eye of saloon owner, Doug Badman. Two temperance evangelists, Ezra Goodman and his daughter Winnifred, arrive in town preaching the benefits of teetotalism only to be set upon by the drunken brawlers.
Then a strange gun-slinger mysteriously turns up to save the day. He’s called Lemonade Joe because he only drinks lemonade which keeps his reflexes from being dulled by alcohol and who praises the soft-drink Kolaloka, a drink that keeps your mind clear. Soon Joe and the Goodmans have opened the Kolaloka Saloon, an alcohol free establishment and church to Kolaloka, and is soon doing a roaring trade.
Furious at losing business Doug Badman enlists the help of his long lost brother Horace, aka Hogofogo, master criminal of the Wild West. Hogofogo has designs not just to destroy Kolaloka and bring customers back to the Trigger Whisky Saloon but also on the sweet Winnifred Goodman, too. Hopefully the upstanding Lemonade Joe will save the day and the girl, but what if Lemonade Joe is also hiding a secret identity?
If ‘Adela Has Not Had Her Supper Yet’ (1977) was controlled chaos then ‘Lemonade Joe’ makes it seem sedate in comparison. The title is appropriate as this film feels like a bottle of soda shaken to the point of spurting all over you and it’s up to you to decide if that’s a pleasurable experience or not.
It starts at a blistering pace with a bar room brawl that redefines the word “frantic”. Every punch, tumble, crash, impact is carefully choreographed and edited to within an inch of its life. Speed the entire thing up silent movie style and the result is aggressively captivating.
That goes for the movie as a whole because ‘Lemonade Joe’ is relentless to the point of being almost off-putting. Every second some visual or sonic violence is slapping you in the face and running off laughing into the distance. Tricks, gimmicks and deliberate irritations abound threatening to turn ‘Lemonade Joe’ into nothing more than a Czech New-Wave Benny Hill. Yet Lipský is too consistently inventive, too smart, to let that happen with everything carefully thought out and pulled off with total skill.
For example — there’s a moment when Hogofogo declares his sexual desire for Winnifred whilst walking up to the camera to blacken it out. Lipský then hard cuts to an extreme close-up of the vibrating inside of Lemonade Joe’s mouth before pulling back by a series of three, quick edits out of Joe’s hollering orifice and straight into a musical number. It’s remarkable, funny, striking, and sexually outrageous (cutting from Hogofogo’s sexual leering to a pulsing tunnel of flesh) and ‘Lemonade Joe’ fizzes with moments like this.
But it’s not all anarchy and mayhem (although it actually kinda is) as ‘Lemonade Joe’ contains scenes that are aesthetically eye-popping. My favourite is when Winnifred is singing the song ‘Arizona’ in the Kolaloka saloon as a bar fight explodes around her and it might be the most beautiful bar fight I’ve ever seen. Winnifred’s song is both hesitatingly cute and bashfully shy as slow-motion bodies fly and collide to the music around her. It’s done with the simple technique of superimposing different layers of film but each thrown cowboy, every flying outlaw, seems so meticulously choreographed I found myself almost tearing-up it was so insanely pretty. And keep an eye out for the shot when Winnifred is handing out leaflets crowded bar near the start as she extols the virtues of abstinence; it’s phenomenally well done.
The acting is also joyous, especially from Milos Kopecký as the evil Hogofogo who totally steals the movie with an exaggerated silent-movie style performance that’s a marvel of comedic precision and barely contained insanity (I adore the little flourish of a bow he gives when stepping out of his disguise). Karel Fiala is suitably all white-teeth and perma-smile as the singing Lemonade Joe and Olga Schoberová is effortlessly charming as the spirited Winnifred.
I absolutely loved ‘Lemonade Joe’. It’s a blast to the face of constant invention with almost every shot delivering a wild gag or an explosion of deconstructive self-sabotage and all presented via some truly beautiful cinematography along with a sublime and rousing score. The film might not be for everybody with its manic intensity potentially reducing it all to nothing more than a load of comedic exclamations points and it does threaten to become a little flat towards the end, but it pulls it all together for a climax that’ll either make you happy or deeply furious.
Personally I loved it as ‘Lemonade Joe’ is a film of pure sparkling delight and one I greedily gulped down, giggling as its little bubbles of brilliance tickled my nose.
