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Film

Non-Western Westerns

Saturday, Apr 5, 2008

3 p.m.

Additional Info

Lemonade Joe, Oldrich Lipsky, 1964, 99 min.

Made in Czechoslovakia, Lemonade Joe is arguably the sharpest and funniest satire of the Western to have come out of the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. From East Germany to Siberia, many filmmakers took up the Western genre, often inverting its structures as a way of criticizing imperialism and capitalism in the United States. Lemonade Joe is a teetotaling gunslinger who takes on the whiskey-drinkers – but only in order to pave the way for sales of a soft drink called Kolaloka.