All Slights Deserved

I was commenting just a couple of weeks ago (with regard to Sexmission ) how eastern European comedy comes across as very broad and affected to western sensibilities, at least during the Cold war era. Probably the closest we've seen to an English language film done in the same style would, for obvious reasons, be Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers , which for all its visual flair and Komeda's wonderful score falls rather flat with the slapstick pratfalls. As I mentioned last time the prominence of this kind of humour probably owed a lot to the censorious climate, where more subversive wit was usually frowned upon. A good example of this is Milos Forman's The Fireman's Ball , which although not especially radical by our standards was criticised in Czechoslovakia for its veiled attack on the petty bureaucracy of communism. No such ire was directed towards Lemonade Joe , which was released a few years earlier; perhaps because it does precisely the opposite ...