Kdo chce zabít Jessii?

I believe that Who Wants to Kill Jessie? may be the only Czechoslovakian comedy/sci-fi/fantasy film I've ever seen. Who am I kidding - of course it is. And to my surprise and delight, it's a winner. In the film, a research scientist, Dr Ruzenka Berankova, has developed a drug that can alter dreams. The unknown side effect is that the dreams can leave the subject's mind and end up in our reality. In this case, Ruzenka's husband, Dr Jindrich Beranek, has been dreaming about antigravity gloves that could help with a research problem he's been having. In his dream, however, the gloves are owned by a gorgeous blond woman, Jessie. In the dream, she's being chased by a Superman-like character and a cowboy who also want the gloves. Jindrich takes Ruzenka's drug and, viola, he wakes up to find Jessie in his bed with the two goons hot on her heels. Much hilarity ensues.

What an incredibly odd, absurd, and completely whacked-out film that somehow manages to work. This is screwball comedy at its finest. And unlike a lot of the other European comedies I've seen that I really can't stand, Who Wants to Kill Jessie? remains consistently funny from start to finish. The acting is much better than I expected. The married scientists at the center of things, played by Dana Medricka and Jiri Sovak, are very good. I'm not surprised to see that both had long careers. Jessie is played by Olga Schoberova. She fits the part of the dreamy (pun intended) Jessie perfectly. Finally, I appreciate the way the movie blends the comic-book style dreams with real life. I really got a kick out of the fact that the dream characters are silent, relying on speech clouds to get their thoughts across. The funny bit is the way the other characters interact with the speech clouds. Really clever stuff.

If I were a much smarter person, I'm sure I could write at length on the underlying anti-communist messages found in Who Wants to Kill Jessie? Because I'm not that smart, I'll just say that it wasn't lost on me. The idea that you can do what you want to someone, but you can't take away their dreams was loud and clear.

8/10

One of the first "pop" 60s movies to appropriate comic-strip imagery (including dialogue balloons), "Who Killed Jessie?"--a ruse, since nobody kills her--is a buoyant, sometimes bawdy exercise in fantasy farce. Two dully married, middle-aged scientists create havoc when her experimental device releases figures from his dreams into the real world. Thus a musclebound superman, bodacious damsel-in-distress and laconic cowboy are suddenly running around Prague, wreaking havoc with their indestructible nature and archetypical fantasy behaviors. It's a hilarious novelty-a sci-fi screwball comedy.

The Czech sci-fi comedy Who Wants to Kill Jessie is one of the most oddball, whimsical, original films I've seen in quite a while. It starts off with a brilliant yet seldom explored premise: What happens when fictional characters find themselves trapped in reality. It then proceeds to explore this idea in a most comical fashion, and to blend fantasy and reality in a way that is both seamless and jarring.

It all begins with an older married couple. The husband, a mechanical engineer, has become hooked on a comic serial which shares the name of this film. The wife, a neurologist, has developed a method of viewing and modifying a person's dreams, which unknown to her, also brings their dreams to life. When she hears her husband talking in his sleep about some 'Jessie', she promptly tries out her invention on him. And sure enough, they are soon joined not only by Jessie, but also the villains who have been pursuing her for the secrets to her inventions. Mayhem ensues as the living dreams chase each other across the city, the cops try to keep up, and the wife grows more and more jealous.

Who Wants to Kill Jessie gets high marks for the originality of its ideas, and even higher marks for how it explores them. For instance, the way the fictional characters continue to communicate in speech bubbles, leading one boy to reply "Sorry miss, I can't read." Or the way that when someone takes an uppercut, they take a ballistic trajectory over the nearest rooftop. You can tell that something's off with the jerky way they move, but that only makes it more cartoonish. And in the comic books, it doesn't matter how much destruction your battles leave, but in the real world, you put a hole in someone's bathroom wall and you're looking at a lawsuit.

Which brings up an interesting question: Can visions be held liable for damages, or are they the responsibility or the one who dreamed them? This and other questions are dealt with in the most ridiculous courtroom scene since Duck Soup. The scientists' attempts to figure out what to do with the figments are equally comic and unorthodox.

Not all of the laughs come from the fish-out-of-water paradigm either. The henpecked husband angle is played for all it's worth. And the wife's jealousy has ironic payoff when she finds the man of her dreams. The weak-willed, bribe taking prison guard is also good for a chuckle, and perhaps a subtle comment on the government. More direct is one doctor's comment about the party's potential uses for the dream modification technology. One thing about the Czechs; even when they're cracking you up, they know how to make a serious point.

In 1960's America, millions tuned in to the 'BIFF!' 'BAM!' 'POW!' action of the Batman television series. But this 'pop art' phenomenon was not limited to the North American shores. A continent away, another comic book hero, or in this case heroine, was quite literally springing to life in the Czech film 'Who Wants to Kill Jessie?'.

'Who Wants to Kill Jessie?' is a nonsensical film, which begins with a fantastical premise and then madly and unapologetically dashes from one ridiculous situation to another. Which, in the case of a film of this type, is not necessarily a bad thing.

Dana Medrická as Dr. Rose Beránková is the catalyst for all events in the film. Dr. Beránková has just invented a serum that allows dreams to be altered so that undesirable elements can be removed. The effectiveness of this invention can be tested via a dream scanner which allows observers to monitor a person's drams on a TV screen. This remarkable device is seemingly so commonplace that the good doctor keeps one next to her own bed.

The trouble begins when the jealous Rose catches her husband, Henry (Jirí Sovák) dreaming about the gorgeous blonde comic book heroine, Jessie, though in fact he is dreaming about her anti-gravity gloves, and decides to eliminate her dream girl rival by injecting Henry with the new serum.

The next morning however, Rose discovers that subjects removed from dreams, rather simply disappearing, are brought into the real world, and now not only Jessie (the beautiful Olga Schoberová) but her two adversaries, an evil cowboy and a villainous superman, have come to life. Jessie quickly escapes her two foes and begins to track Henry to the University where he is lecturing, pursued by the destructive superman and cowboy, who are in turn being pursued by the police.

When the police finally catch up with the dream trio, Henry is arrested as well. Rose is perfectly willing to let her husband take the blame for the whole mess, testifying at his trial that if he had dreamed about his wife instead of Jessie, none of this would have happened. In the end, while Rose plots a way to dispose of the dream characters, it is up to an imprisoned Henry to save the day, by actually creating the anti-gravity gloves from the comic book.

Interestingly, the film's two comic book villains are not really very evil. They are greedy and destructive, but not cruel or vicious. While the Cowboy is constantly threatening people with his six shooter, he never actually shoots anyone. No one is hurt and no one is killed. Likely this is because these manifestations are not the villains from the Jessie comic, but Henry's interpretation of them from his dreams. Since Henry's dreams are not violent, neither are the realized dream villains. In the same way, while the comic book Jessie has never heard of Henry, the dream Jessie is attracted to him and so the manifested Jessie professes her love for him – which does nothing to improve Henry's standing with Rose.

The closest thing to a true villain the film has is Rose. It is her petty jealously that leads her to first create the problem, then allow her befuddled husband to be jailed for it, and finally to attempt, futilely, to destroy the dream people in quite horrible and savage ways. The viciousness of Rose's actions is muted only by the film's consistently light tone, and the fact that her attempts are completely ineffectual against the seemingly indestructible manifestations.

Undoubtedly the most remarkable thing about this film is that it exists at all. While comic book style films were all the rage in Italy, France and America, in the 1960's Czechoslovakia was still an Iron Curtain country, albeit one experiencing a period of cultural freedom. A film as utterly and delightfully frivolous as 'Who Wants to Kill Jessie?' is as a bold departure from the popular stereotype of the bleak, somber, pathos drenched film of the Soviet Bloc era as one could imagine. This is a film that has no political agenda, aside from a very few light jabs at rigid bureaucracy, tosses away logic and simply delights in being silly.

Long a difficult film to see, usually available for viewing only at film festivals, 'Who Wants to Kill Jessie?' has at last been released on DVD in a very nice 2.35:1 widescreen edition by Centrum Video in Europe, complete with English subtitles. The bonus features, including an interview with writer/director Václav Vorlícek, are unfortunately in Czech only with no English subtitling.

SWOOSH! ZOOM! THUD! CRASH! ROAR! RIP! No, not the opening credit sequence from a Batman film - but from "Who Wants to Kill Jessii ?" (released in 1966 - which would be a year Batman fans would recognize;) two years before the Prague Spring was crushed by Soviet tanks rumbling into Czechoslovakia. Books, films, and newspapers were able to get in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) digs at the establishment; science fiction has frequently provided a way to make social commentary which flies "beneath the radar" of censors, be they capitalist, communist, or socialist. But besides the sly jabs here and there - "Liberty to dreams!" - "Your identity card!" - "Can't she be re-educated?"(said: by a comic superhero; to a comic superhero; about a comic superhero) the film provides much amusement just on its own.

Rosie & Henry both work in a university setting. Rosie is a medical researcher doing research on dreams, presenting her KR VI injection as a way of changing nightmares into pleasant dreams. She demonstrates this with a sleeping cow - headphones attached, a monitor shows the cow's dream of being pursued by gadflies. After the injection, the cow is sleeping in a hammock, a string quartet playing for her. Her husband Henry is faced with the problem of securing an extremely heavy piece of machinery to an overhead rail in a university laboratory. He picks up a comic book one of his co-workers has brought in and muses how great it would be if he had the use of Jessii's anti-gravity gloves. The intersection of these story lines provides an abundance of humor and commentary.

Read no further if you want to save the surprises, although it's unlikely the 35mm scope print I saw from the Czech Film Archive will be making it to your town anytime soon and I don't think a video version is available.

Thursday seems to be the day of the week that the couple sleeps together. Henry is in a dream with Jessii - they are both bound and he's attempting to untie her with his teeth. Rosie sees him chewing his pillow in his sleep. She slips the dream monitor on him, sees Henry with Jessii and gives him an injection of KR VI and sends him to his separate bed. In the morning, much to his astonishment, the comic strip Jessii is alive and in his bed! And she is not the only character brought to life - the bad guys are in the bathroom.

Rosie has a feeling that her experiment has gone awry and locks the comic trio in their flat before she and Henry leave for work. Her colleagues tell her that gadlies have appeared in the lab, seemingly from abiogenesis - her serum seems to cause things in dreams to cross over into real life. At the husband's factory he and his co-workers attempt construction of the anti-gravity gloves. Both Henry & Rosie send a co-worker to their flat with instructions: Henry asks a female worker to bring back Jessii; Rosie tells her male coworker to get train tickets and send the comic characters "to Kookle".

But by the time they arrive at the flat, Jessii has escaped and the bad guys (a superman-like character and an old-west gunslinger) have broken through the wall of the flat in pursuit, crying "Liberty to dreams!". The police arrive about the same time as the coworkers (each of whom thinks the other is the one they are to bring) and take them into custody over their objections. Jessii tunes in her TV wristwatch to see Henry giving a lecture to a class at university about ideas from science fiction crossing over into reality. The classroom turns into bedlam after Jessii arrives with the strong man in pursuit.

Writer Milos Macourek has a lot of fun with comic book convention - those characters talk in "bubbles" of text. When one of them asks a young boy what time it is, the reply is "I can't read, sir." In a court appearance Jessii answers a question by telling Henry "I love you!" and he turns the "bubble" so the court recorder can read it. Henry is sentenced to jail for disruption of the peace. He uses the walls of his cell to do equations for the antigravity gloves.

Rosie and the authorities determine that the dream characters are dangerous. Rosie says "I've been charged with their liquidation." The strong man is bound and put on a conveyer belt into a crematorium to the strains of Sibelius. Just about the time they think the problem solved, the strong man appears out of the fire saying "Very refreshing - how much?" Those attempting to dispatch Jessii have similar difficulties. Tying her between two trucks pulling in opposite directions, the trucks only spin their wheels.

Henry manages to escape from jail and picks up the partially functioning gloves and uses them to rescue Jessii. They return through the cell bars (Henry pulls them apart with the help of the gloves to get back to his cell surruptitiously) and Jessii points out a mistake in his calculations.

Rosie has concocted a new serum, A VII, and finds an injection of this will cause a dream figure to be re-absorbed into a nearby subject. She injects a rabbit from a dream of their dog. It dematerializes and re-appears in the dog's dream on the monitor.

Rosie is giving the strong man a sponge bath (I forget exactly how this came to pass) and tells him "It's Thursday!" Apparently he knows what this means and escapes to inject himself with A VII. He dematerializes and also ends up in the dog's dream. Rosie, seeing this on the monitor, injects herself and follows. Henry and Jessii look at the monitor seeing the dog chasing the bunny and the wife chasing the man. Henry remarks that he'll never get away from her.

Henry teaches Jessii how to speak without the comic strip bubbles and apparently they live happily ever after.