REEES Film Series: Lemonade Joe, or the Horse Opera

Lemonade Joe, or the Horse Opera (dir. Oldrich Lipský, 1964, 99 min)

With Oldrich Lipský Lemonade Joe, the film series introduces viewers to the Red Western. Red Westerns, unlike Osterns, were predominantly produced in the Eastern bloc, rather than the Soviet Union itself and were set in an imagined American West. Lipský film is an absurdist parody of whisky-drinking, pistol-toting American cowboys, and draws extensively on Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles and John Landis’ The Blues Brothers.
Yet Lemonade Joe, produced in Czechoslovakia, incorporates a range of genres and cultural references, almost to the point of excess: Hollywood serials, silent cowboy melodramas, advertising jingles, and Eastern Bloc theatrical comedy come together in this technicolor musical parody. Lemonade Joe turns the frontier trope into a joke, inviting the audience to laugh at the very idea of Western mythmaking.

Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (OWNER), Slavic Languages & Literatures

Contact the organizers