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The Hop-Pickers
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Second Run Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (20th December 2024). |
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The Film
 It is a mandatory requirement that teenagers from all over the country participate in the seasonal harvesting of hops. To all of them it is thankless work. Even handsome model worker Honza (Milos Zavadil) is just "in it for the money," but everyone goes to bed exhausted whether they exceed their quota or come under. Those that stand out from the group are the unpopular ones: intellectually-minded Filip (Loves of a Blonde's Vladimír Pucholt) who earns the contempt of Honza, his buddies, the chairman (Witchhammer's Josef Kemr), and the camp's teacher Jana (Ikarie XB 1's Irena Kacírková) for his lack of sociability, and Hanka (Ivana Pavlová) who dresses in the latest Western fashions and who seems a snob to the other girls. When Honza trips Hanka and causes her to spill her food over her clothes, it is Filip who gets in trouble with the Jana and the chairman for getting into a fistfight with Honza. Hanka pretends to take no notice of Filip's actions until the cook's daughter who admires her insists that Filip did it out of love. Filip's reputation as a troublemaker is not diminished when the girls discover that he has fashioned his own little kingdom of solitude in the sprawling attic space above the boys and girls dormitories (where even Honza notes that they sleep "in feudal conditions"). As Hanka starts to fall for Filip, Honza takes his disliking of Filip to Shakespearean levels, plotting with his cohorts to get him expelled from the camp. Like the previous year's magical realist comedy The Cassandra Cat, Czechoslovakia's first film musical The Hop-Pickers was shot in anamorphic scope with four-channel magnetic stereo sound and was a box office success. With its forbidden lovers and finger-snapping, dancing "gangs" the film even from the start earned nicknames like "East Side Story", "Hop Side Story" and "Czech Side Story" and director Ladislav Rychman had acknowledged (according to the disc's booklet) that West Side Story was the only film musical. The lovers are not from warring families or rival gangs – and, at least, Western viewers have no clues as to whether bookish Filip comes from a different social class than Honza – their relationship is perceived as a distraction to the authoritarian figures and a snub to the standards of sociability for which camp serves as a training ground for the younger characters. Made before the social reforms and freedoms of the Prague Spring, the film's plot is more interesting for the indirect ways in which writer/lyricist Vratislav Blazek (Prague Nights) criticizes the regime which must seem schizophrenic to Western audiences, focusing on those who in authority and model citizens who are actually gaming the system and scapegoating misfits who do not help themselves by seeming overly proud and arrogant in acting on their principles as with the farmer in All My Good Countrymen and the "Andela" segment of Desire, requiring those who are depicted as being forthright as either overly rigid or too naive. Honza is not seen to cheat and may indeed be a hard worker – "the more you do in public, the less people interfere in your private life," he tells Hanka – but he wangles rewards in return for beating his quotas while seeming to just be happy to do his part. Filip, already poorly regarded, is seen to just want to get things over with but dreams of transforming "quotas into bushels" with Hanka resulting in a dream sequence where the camp adopts his scheme of pairing everyone off. It seems that it is not enough that they do the work, they must do it to "build the country." While West Side Story did feature an attempted rape, Hanka simply makes Honza feel ashamed when he makes his intentions know nonverbally. During the dance sequence, Hanka tells Honza that he is "better" than Filip in superficial terms and then indirectly humiliates him with the lyrics of ensuing song with how little she thinks of his advantages. Although Honza has to "snitch" to be the villain, he has had a hand in creating the atmosphere in which even Filip's altruistic behavior is misconstrued – Filip describes him late in the film as a heretofore "undefined type of swine: the two-faced rat" – and the masses eventually turn their back on the rat (as they had once accused Filip of doing to to them) and he who admits to a not unsuspecting Jana that he does not feel sorry for the expelled lovers but "envious." While Filip does "borrow" personal property to create his own attic kingdom and anticipates a more communal cohabitation with Honza than she, he goes before an informal tribunal not falsely accused but nevertheless wronged, with those judging him (who would if ever "in real trouble would for others make it double") nevertheless willing to believe the worst of him as a "noxious individual." While ideology demands that he must be expelled, and Hanka along with him when she steps up after Jana has promised Filip to leave her out of it, they ultimately do have the moral high ground since the threat of "expulsion, shame, and contempt" only works on those who place such an importance on conformity. Half the audience can see the pair off with optimism while the other half can make allowances for overly idealistic youth and the realities they will face later. All of them can marvel at the visual feast of the wide compositions, careening camera moves, balletic choreography, on-the-nose lyrics, and stereophonic instrumentation in a film that may be indebted to the film version of West Side Story while feeling fresh and original in the context of Czech state cinema. 
Video
Although the film did get exported theatrically to a few territories including the U.K., The Hop-Pickers has been hard to see outside of the Czech Republic where it previously received a Czech DVD release with no English options. More recently, it received a Czech Blu-ray that included English subtitles and a 5.1 track. Second Run's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.55:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from the same new 4K restoration by the Czech National Film Archive from the original negative (with some missing bits patched in from the best archival print materials). While the restoration notes for >The Cassandra Cat noted that it was shown in a variety of aspect ratios, the notes here only mention the decision to frame it at the widest option 2.55:1 and not whether it was shown in other aspect ratios (alhtough it must have been shown in cropped, flat prints in some venues for it to have been so widely shown in Czechoslovakia at the time). Presumably shot with earlier Cinemascope lenses, wide shots can be softish along the edges of the frame and sharper but not "sharp" in the center, but close-ups reveal some nice fine detail in the facial features, hair, and clothing of the actors (close-ups are kept at a minimum in the field scenes because the hops had to be spray-painted green since the film was shot out of season). Colors skew towards grays, browns, greens, and blues but whites are balanced even in the nocturnal-hued sequences while reds are present but more burgundy and rarely popping likely due to the film stock and the color scheme. Individual shots within the same scenes sometimes are green-tinged or blue-tinged but these might be patched bits. The restoration notes also mention the objective to restore the film to the conditions under which it would have been seen theatrically at the time so reel change marks remain. 
Audio
The film's four-channel magnetic stereo mix has also been remastered from elements digitized in 2003 and is also presented here in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 as well as an LPCM 2.0 stereo downmix. This surround mix is even more ambitious than The Cassandra Cat with the music having been recorded in quadrophonic sound. At the start, nature sounds are centered but then the film's chorus appears and the placement of the guitars establishes the potentials of the mix for both width and depth which continues throughout the successive musical numbers. Effects are more panormanic than directional, dialogue is centered, and nsong vocals are anchored towards the center but sound "wider." Busier scenes like the dorm, canteen, and field musical numbers fill the soundstage but there are also more intimate moments which are dominated by dialogue (even whispered) rather than distracting underscore. Optional English subtitles are free of errors and do a good job of translating the lyrics and making them sound "lyrical" in English. 
Extras
Video extras consist of the film's theatrical trailer (1:34) and a trio of short films that give context to the hop picking brigade: "Gift of the Earth [Dar země]" (1932, 45:34), "One Hundred and Ten Years of the Pilsen Brewery [Sto deset let plzeňských piwowarů]" (1952, 22:25) directed by Karel Zeman (The Fabulous Baron Munchausen), and "The Processing of Hops [Posklizňová úprava chmelu]" (1964, 12:57). 
Packaging
Of more interest in terms of the film itself is the included 24-page booklet featuring an essay by author Jonathan Owen who discusses the works of Rychman and Blazek before and after the film in terms of how they adapted to the aftermath of the Prague Spring, the Hollywood-style promotion of the film and its critical reception, the careers of the three leads – the studio was resistant to casting Pucholt who was "not suitably glamorous" and he later retired from acting and became a doctor – and a thoughtful analysis of the film that does make sense of the viewers' likely bewildered to reconcile the story and the characters in the context of the Communist regime. 
Overall
Czechoslovakia's first film musical may be indebted to the film version of West Side Story but it feels fresh and original in the context of Czech state cinema.
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