An excerpt from the booklet essay by Jonathan Owen.

The beginnings of Who Wants to Kill Jessie? go back to the early 1960s, when Václav Vorlíček started longing to make a comedy film ‘based on my knowledge of comics’. The idea was strikingly contemporary, even ahead of its time. Though the film would not be completed and released until 1966, Jessie was still among the first in a cycle of European films featuring comic-book characters or otherwise incorporating comic ‘aesthetics and designs’, a cycle that includes Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966), Mario Bava’s superb Danger: Diabolik (1968) and Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968), along with more obscure entries like Umberto Lenzi’s Kriminal (1966) and Bruno Corbucci’s Ms. Stiletto (Isabella, duchessa dei diavoli, 1969). Vorlíček’s film also premiered the same year as the American ABC network’s Batman series, which savoured comic conventions with a similarly camp relish – its bang-pow ‘Bat-fight’ captions a Transatlantic cousin to Jessie’s speech bubbles.

Vorlíček’s idea was all the more noteworthy in view of the fact that comics were not too well-known or officially favoured in Czechoslovakia at this time. Yet neither did the country lack a comics tradition. Writing of the Czech lands specifically, scholar Garance Fromont dates the ‘first true Czech comics’ back to 1922, and famed artist Josef Lada’s The Pranks of Frantík Vovísek and Bobeš the Goat (Šprýmovné kousky Frantíka Vovíska a kozla Bobeše) – Lada being the first domestic artist to use speech bubbles with his illustrations. Important further developments in the Czech comic were Punťa in 1930 – the first publication ‘exclusively devoted to a comic strip’ – and, in 1938, the legendary boys’ adventure story series Fast Arrows (Rychlé šípy). Czech comics suffered censorship under both Nazi occupation and the communist regime, with the latter condemning comics as a reactionary, Western medium. José Alaniz suggests though that comics never entirely fell victim to this ‘state anti-Westernism’, ‘despite periods of greater censure’. Vorlíček himself had, as he put it, a ‘head start’ in his appreciation of comics. Staying with his grandmother in the Southern Bohemian town of Blatná just after the War, the young Vorlíček would collect the comics discarded by the American soldiers who had been stationed there. Upon making Who Wants to Kill Jessie?, Vorlíček trusted that domestic viewers would have enough general awareness of comics for the film’s jokes to land. In a statement at the time of the film’s release, though, he also claimed that Jessie’s speech-bubble effect was meant to ‘acquaint the viewer’ with this comic convention, since comics are ‘not so popular in our country.’

Jessie’s script was written over three Sundays. The film was produced by the Kubala-Novotný creative group, one of several such groups based at Prague’s Barrandov Studios. (These were partly autonomous units that would supervise a film’s ‘whole production process’ – a feature of the state-owned but decentralised film industry of the time.) According to Vorlíček, the group was ‘very hesitant’ about the script, which was accepted only through the ‘intercession’ of his friend, script editor Alexander Kliment. The film’s production seems not to have been troubled by any specifically ideological opposition.1 Both the leadership of Barrandov and the studio representatives of the state censorship board commended it as ‘a comedy of international standing’ – with the former objecting only to a perceived loss of pace at the end. This lack of political qualms may seem surprising in view of the disreputable theme of American-style comics, as well as the film’s (barely) disguised satire of communist authority. However, by the mid-1960s, Czechoslovakia’s cultural sphere (if not its political sphere) was already relatively liberal. In addition, critic Ondřej Čížek writes of the reassuring role played by the authors’ claims that this was to be a ‘pure parody’ of comics – in other words not a ‘tribute’ to the medium but an ‘entertaining jab at Western trash’. As Vorlíček himself has noted, the evocation of comics was acceptable to the extent that he was appearing to make fun of them. Might this also have helped distract from the film’s real satirical target? Other crazy comedies were similarly packaged for official assessment as parodies, as attacks on American pop culture, even as it remains at least moot how far these films are actually parodying their source material, and how far they are playfully paying homage or even sincerely appropriating it.

 

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