The Hop-Pickers
(Ladislav Rychman) 1964 Second Run Blu Ray
Before director Ladislav Rychman made The Hop-Pickers (1964) Czech cinema had no tradition of the screen musical. Indeed the director is said to have seen no other film musicals besides West Side Story (1961) and then only half way through completing The Hop-Pickers. And he insists he didn’t copy anything from the Americans. It’s all the more remarkable for this film has a confident fusion of youthful romance, song, dance and music that was groundbreaking and exhilarating in the sixties and proves to be so today. Yet beneath its exuberant surface is a serious film about the morality of generational feelings in an authoritarian state.
Hops, called in the film zelene zlato or green gold, are harvested to make Czech beer. The authorities made teenage, high school students feel they were at a summer camp rather than undergoing forced labour. Boys were strictly separated from girls in their accommodation with a teacher acting as a chaperone. Filip (Vladimir Pucholt) is intellectually inclined and a bit of a rebel according to his professor Jana (Irena Kacirkova). He and Honza brawl over their attraction to the pretty Hanka. Hanka is attracted to the dreamy non-conformity of Filip who has his own well furnished room full of stuff he’s pinched from the chairman (Joseph Kemr). The authorities suspect Flip and Hanka are having sexual relations and begin to investigate.
The Hop-Pickers opens with three young men dressed in black, playing guitars and singing a pithy commentary on the film about to unfold. Looking rather like Cliff Richard’s group The Shadows they act as a kind of Greek chorus throughout The Hop-Pickers, telling us the story we are about to see could be your son’s or daughter’s. Their tone is ironic and gently satirical as it introduces conflicts between the communal and the individual; state behaviour over sexual freedom; communist over capitalist ideals and the expression of first love navigating through the differences and eventually rebelling.
If those concerns make The Hop-Pickers sound over-serious then that’s not so. It has great charm, catchy songs, a naturalistic, not quite choreographed dancing, that’s spontaneously modern; engaging lead performances and an innocent playfulness. A sense of play is important to The Hop-Pickers allowing its critique of authority not be earnest nor make its fulsome praise of the hop picking work sound like socialist propaganda. On a first viewing I felt there was an unclear intent here. But on re-watching The Hop-Pickers the film’s genial irony shone through in a nuanced and balanced way.
After Honza, and his gang, rough up Filip they state that this is what they do to “noxious individualists”. However Filip, whose declarations of love to Hanka include reading, of all people, the Greek philosopher Seneca! is eventually respected, by his fellow students, for his stand on youthful freedom. It’s interesting that they all assume that he and Hanka have had sex, but their puppy love doesn’t go beyond petting and kissing. Yet this is not a sentimentalised boy meets girl scenario for there’s a strong, quiet defiance about Filip and Hanka when they are eventually expelled from the summer camp.
Director Rychman also leaves us with a sense of ambivalence about how Jana and the chairman dealt with the situation. The repression / suppression of the state line on moral behaviour is being questioned. A seed of doubt has been planted. Everything at the end of The Hop-Pickers intimates that deeper changes might be on the way. But for now it’s only an uncertain preparedness. The appearance of Dubceck and his Prague Spring reforms was still four years away.
If The Hop-Pickers had no real Czech musical precedents it’s still possible to detect in the hop labour and bedroom scenes a touch of the American musical in the form of Donen’s The Pajama Game.
And looking forward I wonder if Jacques Demy might have seen the film. The wide screen colour palette of some interiors in The Hop-Pickers and the choreography appeared quite Demyesque.
The Hop-Pickers is a delightful, quirky and very entertaining film.
A cult classic in the Czech Republic. We need to get to know it better.
Alan Price©2024.
The Hop-Pickers
(Ladislav Rychman) 1964 Second Run Blu Ray
Before director Ladislav Rychman made The Hop-Pickers (1964) Czech cinema had no tradition of the screen musical. Indeed the director is said to have seen no other film musicals besides West Side Story (1961) and then only half way through completing The Hop-Pickers. And he insists he didn’t copy anything from the Americans. It’s all the more remarkable for this film has a confident fusion of youthful romance, song, dance and music that was groundbreaking and exhilarating in the sixties and proves to be so today. Yet beneath its exuberant surface is a serious film about the morality of generational feelings in an authoritarian state.
Hops, called in the film zelene zlato or green gold, are harvested to make Czech beer. The authorities made teenage, high school students feel they were at a summer camp rather than undergoing forced labour. Boys were strictly separated from girls in their accommodation with a teacher acting as a chaperone. Filip (Vladimir Pucholt) is intellectually inclined and a bit of a rebel according to his professor Jana (Irena Kacirkova). He and Honza brawl over their attraction to the pretty Hanka. Hanka is attracted to the dreamy non-conformity of Filip who has his own well furnished room full of stuff he’s pinched from the chairman (Joseph Kemr). The authorities suspect Flip and Hanka are having sexual relations and begin to investigate.
The Hop-Pickers opens with three young men dressed in black, playing guitars and singing a pithy commentary on the film about to unfold. Looking rather like Cliff Richard’s group The Shadows they act as a kind of Greek chorus throughout The Hop-Pickers, telling us the story we are about to see could be your son’s or daughter’s. Their tone is ironic and gently satirical as it introduces conflicts between the communal and the individual; state behaviour over sexual freedom; communist over capitalist ideals and the expression of first love navigating through the differences and eventually rebelling.
If those concerns make The Hop-Pickers sound over-serious then that’s not so. It has great charm, catchy songs, a naturalistic, not quite choreographed dancing, that’s spontaneously modern; engaging lead performances and an innocent playfulness. A sense of play is important to The Hop-Pickers allowing its critique of authority not be earnest nor make its fulsome praise of the hop picking work sound like socialist propaganda. On a first viewing I felt there was an unclear intent here. But on re-watching The Hop-Pickers the film’s genial irony shone through in a nuanced and balanced way.
After Honza, and his gang, rough up Filip they state that this is what they do to “noxious individualists”. However Filip, whose declarations of love to Hanka include reading, of all people, the Greek philosopher Seneca! is eventually respected, by his fellow students, for his stand on youthful freedom. It’s interesting that they all assume that he and Hanka have had sex, but their puppy love doesn’t go beyond petting and kissing. Yet this is not a sentimentalised boy meets girl scenario for there’s a strong, quiet defiance about Filip and Hanka when they are eventually expelled from the summer camp.
Director Rychman also leaves us with a sense of ambivalence about how Jana and the chairman dealt with the situation. The repression / suppression of the state line on moral behaviour is being questioned. A seed of doubt has been planted. Everything at the end of The Hop-Pickers intimates that deeper changes might be on the way. But for now it’s only an uncertain preparedness. The appearance of Dubceck and his Prague Spring reforms was still four years away.
If The Hop-Pickers had no real Czech musical precedents it’s still possible to detect in the hop labour and bedroom scenes a touch of the American musical in the form of Donen’s The Pajama Game.
And looking forward I wonder if Jacques Demy might have seen the film. The wide screen colour palette of some interiors in The Hop-Pickers and the choreography appeared quite Demyesque.
The Hop-Pickers is a delightful, quirky and very entertaining film.
A cult classic in the Czech Republic. We need to get to know it better.
Alan Price©2024.
By Alan Price • film, year 2024 • Tags: Alan Price, film