by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “Vintage Sci-Fi” film screening in Golden Hill
was a tribute to Czech director and animator Karel Zeman, including a 17-minute
British TV short about him called The World of Karel Zeman (I’m assuming it was for British TV because it was
narrated in British-accented English) and two of his most famous films, Baron
Prácil — known in the English-speaking
world as The Fabulous Baron Münchhausen or The Outrageous Baron Münchhausen (1962) and The Stolen Airship (1967). The Münchhausen movie was well known enough that Carlos Clarens
listed it in his book on horror films (though it’s really more of a light
children’s fantasy than a horror film) in 1967 and Terry Gilliam saw it at the
British Film Institute in the late 1980’s, which inspired him to do his own
Münchhausen movie, which had one of the most troubled production histories of
all time (though, as I noted when Charles and I watched Gilliam’s The
Brothers Grimm, it’s hard to think of a
Terry Gilliam film that didn’t
have a troubled production history!) and finally stumbled its way into release
in 1988. Karel Zeman (whose name blessedly has no diacriticals, rare in a Czech
name) was a Czech artist, film director and animator who lived from 1910 to
1989 (which means that he was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, lived most
of his adult life in Czechoslovakia and died in the Czech Republic), and
judging from the clips shown in The World of Karel Zeman, he began in much the same way as his fellow Eastern
European George Pal (a native Hungarian who emigrated to the U.S.), making
films with puppets animated with stop-motion. Once he began making features,
however, he decided that all the humans in his movies would be played by live
actors while the fantastic elements of his stories would be realized in a
dazzling array of techniques, including drawn animation, cut-out animation,
stop-motion animation and various types of process work to integrate his
animations into scenes with live humans. Zeman also used the alternation
between black-and-white and color quite extensively, to the point where
sometimes watching one of his films you can’t be sure whether they’re in
black-and-white or color (and the relatively poor quality of the DVD’s we were
watching may have blurred the distinction because not only were we getting
low-resolution images — though I think Zeman wouldn’t have wanted his films in too high a resolution because that
might have enabled viewers to pick apart his complex shots and figure out how
they were done — but the colors were so badly faded it’s hard to tell whether
Zeman wanted the color sections
of his films to look this anemic or he wanted them bright and vivid to contrast
with the black-and-white portions).
Münchhausen is of course based on a series of fantasy stories by
Rudolf Erich Raspe, a German writer, in his 1785 book Baron
Münchhausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. According to the character’s Wikipedia page, there
was a real Baron Münchhausen who fought for Russia in a war against Turkey from
1735 to 1739, and Raspe heard some of his stories and started spinning tales of
a fictional — and supernatural — Münchhausen, including a famous one in which
Baron Münchhausen goes to the moon in a fantastical airship drawn through the
cosmos by flying horses. That’s been the anecdote most Münchhausen filmmakers
haven’t been able to resist, and the “spin” Zeman and his writers, Jirí Brdecka
and Josef Keinar, put on it is that Münchhausen (Milos Kopecky) gets to the
moon, greets the three astronauts from Jules Verne’s From the Earth
to the Moon (even though in Verne’s novel
they merely orbited the moon and
didn’t actually set foot on it) and Cyrano de Bergerac, and then meets an
astronaut called Tony (“Tonik” in the original Czech) (Rudolf Jelínek) who has
gone to the moon, albeit in a more prosaic and scientifically possible fashion
involving rockets and the like. Münchhausen is convinced that Tony is an actual
moon person, not an earthling who is dressed in a spacesuit because he had to
go there in a scientifically possible way instead of Münchhausen’s fantastic
one, and Münchhausen decides to bring Tony back to Earth as proof he actually
got to the moon. The two land in Turkey (remember that Turkey was the enemy the
real Baron Münchhausen was
fighting in his war) and Tony spies an imprisoned princess, Bianca (Jana
Brejchová), whom he determines to rescue from the evil Sultan (Rudolf
Hrusínsky) who’s holding her prisoner. He gets her out, then she gets
recaptured, he gets her out again, she gets recaptured again, and that’s about
all the plot this movie has until the very end, when Tony and Bianca finally get back together and kiss, but Münchhausen insists
that a relationship between a moon man and a human female is unworkable and
takes Tony “back” to the moon.
Münchhausen is a quite clever and engaging movie, and as a 45-minute short it
might have been a masterpiece, but as the film drones on and on and on to twice that length it just gets duller and duller,
and as spectacular as Zeman’s gags are, they’re also awfully cute and not
particularly funny (though there’s one great scene — in which Tony discovers
the pedal that makes knives surround the Sultan in case anyone gets too close
to the throne, and at the end the Sultan himself departs and in his place
emerges a giant cannon in a scene that reminded me of Buster Keaton’s great
business with the cannon in The General), and Münchhausen just
sort of goes along like a lot of other fantasies in which the writers make the
big mistake that because they’re working in a genre in which literally anything can happen, they make whatever they want to have
happen happen without maintaining internal consistency or playing by an overall
set of story rules. (One fantasy writer who didn’t do that was J. R. R. Tolkien, though arguably he
erred in the other direction, creating so elaborate a backstory and set of
rules for Middle-Earth he put the reader through the challenge of remembering
them all.) It’s an engaging movie but also a surprisingly dull one, and though
I’ve never seen Gilliam’s Münchhausen I have seen the German
version from 1943, mounted on a lavish scale with a big production budget (at a
time when Germany was losing World War II and one would have thought they’d be
cutting back on expensive
entertainments instead of shooting the works on them!), and it has everything
this one doesn’t: a script (by Emil and the Detectives author Erich Kästner) and direction (by Josef von
Báky) that has everything this version doesn’t: story coherence, glorious and
vivid color (the beautiful Agfacolor process Germans invented during the Nazi
era and the Soviet Union later appropriated), superb acting (Münchhausen was
played by Hans Albers, one of the few stars of Nazi-era German filmmaking who
was rehabilitated and allowed to continue his career after the war) and an
ending with real emotion and pathos instead of Zeman’s, in which the film just
seems to peter out once his imagination and/or his budget ran out.
