A short excerpt from the booklet essay by Jonathan Owen.

The principal creative forces behind The Hop-Pickers were Ladislav Rychman (1922-2007), the film’s director and co-writer, and Vratislav Blažek (1925-1973), who conceived the story, co-wrote the script and authored the lyrics. Rychman and Blažek had first crossed paths as members of the Satire Theatre, a troupe founded by, among others, future film director Oldřich Lipský and his brother Lubomír during the Occupation. With its fusion of word, song, dance and music into a single body, the Satire Theatre was an important formative experience for the co-creators of Czechoslovakia’s first film musical.

Besides his work as a screenwriter, Vratislav Blažek was a significant voice of satire on the Czechoslovak stage. He made an explosive early impact as a dramatist, when his first play – the comic féerie Where is Kuťák? (Kde je Kuťák?, 1948), whose retelling of the Biblical flood served up a ‘transparent’ allegory of the new ‘communist nobility’ – was banned and the Satire Theatre forced to close. Blažek’s debut as a screenwriter was Katka (1949), the first feature of the later internationally renowned filmmaker Ján Kadár. He collaborated with Kadár, and Kadár’s regular directing partner Elmar Klos, on two further films, Music from Mars (Hudba z Marsu, 1954) and Three Wishes (Tři přání, 1958). Music From Mars, a ‘very tame’ but likeable satire about furniture factory workers who turn themselves into a skilled musical ensemble, took inspiration from Hollywood musicals and already showed Blažek’s developed feeling for combining songs and the spoken word. Three Wishes is a modern fairytale in which a man’s desire for material comforts is pitted against the moral imperative to support an unfairly dismissed colleague. This was one of several films subjected to official attack at the notorious 1959 Banská Bystrica Film Festival, and it was not released until 1963. Prior to the ban, though, Blažek had reworked Three Wishes into a popular play.

Blažek’s other most important play is A Much Too Merry Christmas (Příliš štědrý večer, 1960), about a high-up paterfamilias who, looking to solve the mystery of his bafflingly ‘negative’ future son-in-law, discovers a young man who has been unjustly stigmatized for upholding his moral principles. The themes of these plays – youthful nonconformity and the costs of guarding one’s integrity, counterposed with amoral materialism and well-rewarded opportunism – anticipate The Hop-Pickers’ story of rebellious Filip and his cynical nemesis Honza.

Ladislav Rychman was a filmmaker committed both to entertainment and experiment. He began his cinematic career working on agitational or propaganda shorts, then on educational films and films exploring national folk traditions – these ethnographic works, with their incorporation of song and dance, being further preparation for The Hop-Pickers. His feature debut was the crime film The Case is Not Yet Closed (Případ ještě nekončí, 1957), followed by psychological drama The Circle (Kruh, 1959). But his most important and far-reaching contribution, prior to The Hop-Pickers, was his pioneering of the ‘television song’ – a self-contained adaptation of a song in a visually stylised, quasi-dramatised form, a precursor to the modern pop video. He filmed the first of these in 1958, a late add-on for a TV New Year’s special he was directing, and used a song by Vlastimil Hála and Blažek himself, ‘Let’s Furnish Our Apartment’ (‘Dáme si do bytu’) (among his other examples, a 1962 pop-expressionist setting of ‘Mack the Knife’ with the great Miloš Kopecký is particularly recommended). A Thousand Looks Behind the Scenes (Tisíc pohledů za kulisy, 1961), a revue Rychman created from his and other directors’ television songs, won the Bronze Rose at the Montreux Television Festival. Again, these experiences of fusing music, dance, performance and mise-en-scène were vital groundwork for the full-length, full-narrative musical of The Hop-Pickers.

Jonathan Owen’s complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the release.