Cutting
It Short is the English title: probably not one for you if you
only like high speed American style humour, as the film is happy
to milk a gag and let it resurface throughout the story
just when you think it’s been exhausted. It’s set in and around a
Czech brewery in the 1920s with a young brewery manager Francin who’s a
bit of a twerp really and only hangs on to his job because the board of
directors (especially the local doctor) just absolutely drool in the
presence of his sensual and delicious wife Maryška– you
never saw a woman drink beer like she does - and there’s a pork feast
that could have been in Tom Jones!
Louie the pig and his bit parts
would certainly confirm vegetarians in their views. For most of the film Maryška’s the only woman in the town, literally and in
the eyes of the entire male population anyway. The precious Francin has
the brother from Hell, Peppin a male with a Peggy Mount voice, who comes
to visit and has almost everyone running for shelter but certainly stirs
things up. An unforgettable episode has Maryška climbing the brewery chimney in an oh so
diaphanous white dress, closely followed by that loose cannon
brother-in-law Peppin.
The brewery stuff includes plenty
of slapstick cooperage and some handsome copper kettles, plus lingering
camera on Maryška nocturnally bathing herself in a trough with water
from the HLT.
If you like European humour you
won’t find over-contrived the way that the strands are interwoven and
come to the surface in their turn: Cutting It Short will be found to apply
to bobbed hair (and the hairdresser character), hemlines in the Twenties,
cutting costs at the brewery including workers’ hours (and wages), new
wireless sets that shorten distances, and the docking of animals’ tails.
Why does the camera linger on that horse’s twitching backside near the
end? Ho ho! A novel by Bohumila Hrabala, filmed in Czechoslovakia in 1980
by Jiřím
Menzelem, the dvd version has 5.1 sound, titulky in English and other bonusy
including a short Czech tv feature (no titulky). Available new on eBay for
under Ł8 post free if you put in Postriziny (no inflexions needed) or around Ł13 for Cutting It Short. ©RKW