Kdo chce zabít Jessii? (1966) (Who wants to kill Jesse?)
IMDb meta-date is a runtime of 1 hour 20 minutes, rated 7.2 by 1099 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Comedy; Phylum: Zany.
DNA: Czech-o-Slovak.
Verdict: Droll.
Tag-line: Freedom for dreamers!
Dr He is plagued by problems at work and to relieve his frustration he reads the silly comic strip on the back of the technical magazines he has been ransacking for ideas which comics involve a blonde Amazon named Jesse, thwarting a Superman villain and his six-gun totting Subman associate with her mysterious gloves.
Meanwhile his wife, Dr She, is a medical researcher who has devised a means to monitor and edit the dreams of sleepers. Somnolentology can be used to make citizens work harder, better, and happier for the good of all. (Uh?) Did this discovery inspire the 2009 Hungarian movie 1 reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
There are sceptics about her device, so while Dr He dreams of the Amazon’s anti-gravity gloves that could solve his work problem, Dr She attaches her device to this sleeping head. She recoils at the sight of the Amazon in his dream, not realising that her attached device projects the dreams into the world, and Dr She storms off in a jealous rage as Dr He wakes up, even more confused and distressed than usual to find the Amazon is now a reality, as well as the two villains.
So far, so screwy, but wait there is more. All three of the cartoon characters communicate only in speech balloons. Cute. At one point, one of the speech balloons has to be turned so it can be read.
A crazy pursuit follows, up and down buildings, flying through the air, diving into sewers, destroying a lecture hall at Charles University (where I gave a talk once), all to get those gloves, followed by ever more Keystone police and officials. In the midst of this melée Dr He realises how the gloves work. In between scrapes he manufactures a pair of such gloves.
Amazon sees Dr He as her saviour, embroiling him ever more in her escapades to defeat Super- and Sub-man who are so two-dimensional that they cannot be reasoned with, bought off, or reformed. Much chaos follows, and much implied social criticism of the mindless routine of bureaucracy and of institutionalised petty corruption does too. Remember Closely Watched Trains?
Dr She blames him for dreaming of them, and Dr He blames her for objectifying them (per Hegel). Meanwhile, the cartoon characters continue their struggle over the those gloves.
It is fun to watch. ‘Zany’ is the right word. Nothing makes sense but the pace is so fast there is no time to Tsk, tsk. There are well-placed early hints about what is coming, say with the flies, and some nice sight-gags like the doctor smoking a cigar during a medical procedure. The characters are likeable. Even the Super and Sub villains are only acting the way they are drawn, right Jessica Rabbitt?
We escape reality in our dreams but when our dreams come true we are right back in reality! One of the toons does declare ‘Freedom for Dreams!’ While courtroom judge denounces free dreaming and demands the full weight of the law be applied to dreamers to maintain the social order. For more on this circle see the entry on the Hungarian film 1 (2009) elsewhere on this blog. Maybe dreaming was one escape from the heavy hand of communism.