aka Who Could Kill Jessie?
(Kdo Chce Zabit Jessii?)
Czechoslovakia. 1966.
Crew
Director – Vaclav Vorlicek, Screenplay – Milos Macourek & Vaclav Vorlicek, Photography (b&w) – Jan Nemecek, Music – Svatopluk Havelka, Special Effects – Vladimir Dvorak & Jiri Simunek, Set Decorations – Bohumil Pokorny, Cartoon Art – Karel Saudek. Production Company – Filmove Studio Barrandov.
Cast
Jiri Sovak (Professor Jindrich Beranek), Dana Medricka (Professor Ruzenka Berankova), Olga Schoberova (Jessie), Juraj Visny (Superman), Karel Effa (Cowboy), Vladimír Mensík (Kolbaba), Jan Libicek (Prison Guard)
Plot
Professor Ruzenka Berankova introduces her colleagues to a device she has perfected that allows a person’s dreams to be viewed on a screen. Using a cow as a subject, she demonstrates how she can then erase the cow’s troubled dreams for something more pleasant. She is unaware that doing so has caused the gadflies that the cow was dreaming about to manifest in the room. At home, she uses the device on her husband, the engineering professor Jindrich, to discover he is dreaming about Jessie, the sexy heroine of a comic-book he was reading. She uses the device to erase the dream only to wake in the morning and find their apartment invaded by not only Jessie but the superhero and cowboy who have been pursuing Jessie for the power gloves she has. Their appearance causes chaos. Jindrich wants the power gloves for his work, while Ruzenska wants the fictional characters recaptured so she can erase them and get her device working properly.
Who Wants to Kill Jessie? was the first film from Czech director Vaclac Vorlicek (1930-2019). All of Vorlicek’s subsequent work was within the sf/fantasy arena, including the spy movie parody The End of Agent 4WC (1967), the transplants comedy You are a Widow Sir (1971), The Girl on a Broomstick (1972) about a teenage witch, Three Wishes for Cinderella (1973), a version of the Cinderella story, How to Drown Dr Mracke, the Lawyer (1974) about water spirits that inhabit a house, How About a Plate of Spinach? (1977) where two criminals are reduced to children, the fairytale The Prince and the Evening Star (1979), and the comedies Green Wave (1982) and Young Wine (1986).
Who Wants to Kill Jessie? is a good deal of fun. Scientist Dana Medricka creates a device that has the inadvertent side effect of allowing people’s dreams to manifest in reality. Unaware that this is happening, she applies the device to her husband Jiri Sovak who happens to be having dreams of a comic-strip he was reading earlier. This causes the beautiful blond heroine (Olga Schoberova) and two villains pursuing her, respectively a Superman-like superhero (Juraj Visny) and a cowboy (Karel Effa), to appear. Being comic-book characters, they only speak in speech balloons and onomatopoeia – characters are constantly having to bat these out of the way or stop and read what they say, even erase them. Slapstick madness ensues as they run amok around the apartment and in Medricka’s efforts to get rid of them.
The film had apparently started life as a children’s film before being transformed. I am intrigued to know whether the Batman (1966-8) tv series had aired in Czechoslovakia prior to Who Wants to Kill Jessie? being made. Batman premiered on January 12th of 1966, Who Wants to Kill Jessie? appeared in July of the same year. Both make a virtue of the deliberate silliness and artificiality of the comic-book form, in particular with the inclusion of comic-book balloons and onomatopoeia within the visual frame. There is no reason why Batman could not have influenced Vaclac Vorlicek – the question is whether Batman would have aired in Czechoslovakia, which was still a Soviet republic in 1966. On the other hand, the Pop Art movement and Roy Lichtenstein’s appropriation of comic-book panels was in full swing in 1966. Or it could just have been one of those coincidences where two similar cinematic fads appear at the same time independent of the other.
Husband Jiri Sovak and his dream girl Jessie (Olga Schoberova), the comic-book heroine come to life
The film has a great deal of zany fun energy. The results we get feel like the Keystone Kops suddenly having discovered 1960s Batman and the Pop Art movement. You could easily see the film undergoing a modern remake – Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) sort of did but this takes many of the ideas even further. You suspect a modern remake with a Scott Pilgrim-like budget could transform the basics into something amazing.
Vaclav Vorlicek and the cast have a lot of fun with the comic-book characters demolishing the apartment or the comic conundrums in the efforts to recapture them. The latter half of the film descends to a lot of running around and does perhaps reveal that much of the show is essentially a glorified slapstick routine with a cute novelty concept.
Things are all wound up in rather of a deus ex machina solution where the wife discovers that figures can also be transferred back into the dreams of others and abruptly decides to transfer herself and the hunky superman inside the dreams of the cow, leaving the husband with Jessie. Although at the sardonic end fadeout, husband Jiri Sovak happily settles down with dream girl Olga Schoberova who promptly nags him about feeding the dog just like the wife did, revealing that the reality of the fantasy may not be all that he hoped.
Lead actress Olga Schoberova was subsequently hired by Hammer Films, where she was billed as Olinka Berova to appear as the title character in The Vengeance of She (1967).
