Who Wants To Kill Jessie? (1966)

Who Wants To Kill Jessie? poster by artist Jerzy Flizak.

                            Above is a trailer made for a screening of Who Wants To Kill Jessie?

Jessie (Schoberova) expressing her love for her dream lover, Henry (Sovak).

Imagine, if you will, a time when films based on established comic book licenses and/or popular newspaper comic strips were the exception, not the rule. It seems like a foreign concept in these times of endlessly regurgitated Batmen and Spider-whatevers, but there was a brief window in the mid-sixties, following Adam West's Batman Biff! Bang! Pow!-ing onto the scene, and into the cultural zeitgeist, where filmmakers both domestic and abroad dedicated their cameras and budgets to the pop art revolution it inspired, to make both statements and (hopefully) bank from this novel new genre. Before that, comic book fare like Captain Marvel, Captain America, Batman and Superman, were generally relegated to television or film serials aimed at children. After the Batboom spread we got titles like The Three Fantastic Superman franchise, as well as Superargo, from Italy, and other original pulpy creations too numerous to go into here. Noted directors like Mario Bava, Joseph Losey and Roger Vadim turned their hand to the four-color fantasies with the film adaptations of Danger: Diabolik!, Modesty Blaise and Barbarella, as well, to mixed results. Mexico's luchador pictures, starring masked wrestlers like El Santo and Blue Demon taking on the mantle of superheroes-for-hire were repurposed and re-dubbed for American theaters and television by the likes of K. Gordon Murray. Of course, with the surge of comic book films, came films that commented on the idea of comic books as films, such as William Klein's brilliantly bonkers Mr. Freedom.

A cow's nightmare of flies, converted to a relaxing dream of a hammock.

Who Wants To Kill Jessie? (original title Kdo chce zabít Jessii?) is a 1966 Czechoslovakian film that relies on the absurdity of trying to make a two-dimensional comic book a three-dimensional reality as comedic fodder, similar to Klein's hyper-political Mr. Freedom, but eschews the rhetoric to focus more on Abbott and Costello-esque zaniness with a healthy dash of Czech New Wave absurdity. 

The protagonists of our film aren't really superheroes at all, but a couple of unhappy intellectuals. Henry and Rose, husband and wife, are both scientists who, while married, seem to lead rather isolated existences. They don't even share a bed. Save Thursdays, which is their lovemaking night. Though their professions aren't ever really fleshed out, we do know that Rose has developed a serum that can alter dreams. We are introduced to the idea when we are shown a demonstration of the serum to her colleagues, in which a cow is anesthetized and its dreamed projected onto a monitor. We see the cow pursued by flies, which is bringing it great distress. An injection of the dream altering serum reveals that the flies have gone, and the cow is now dreaming about relaxing in a hammock while being serenaded by an orchestra. While things appear to be all well and good, it raises the question: Where did the flies go? Did the serum merely alter the synapses in the cow's brain, forcing it to picture something favorable? Or is there a law of displacement in play that states when you produce one thing, the thing you're displacing has to end up somewhere.  Well, guess what, the flies appear in the laboratory where the cow's dream was altered, answering that question for us, and giving is the doorway through which the premise of the film soon enters.

Pistolnik and Superman

Henry is lonely and finds is career-obsessed wife domineering and cold. He happens across a comic strip on the back of a technical journal one day and becomes fascinated with the character Jessie; a superwoman who is super strong, super intelligent, and super beautiful. He soon begins to dream of her, and her stock villains–a trigger happy cowboy and a Superman spoof–who are after her latest invention: a pair of "antigravitational gloves." Noticing Henry's unrest while dreaming, Rose places his dream on the monitor and, miffed that he's dreaming about a beautiful young heroine rather than his own wife, attempts to rid him of the dream with her serum. Of course this thrusts Jessie and her arch-enemies Pistolnik (cowboy) and Superman (litigation that somehow didn't happen) into the real world. 

Henry dons the "antigravitational gloves."

Of course the recent imports continue their escapades around town and end up wreaking havoc, destroying Henry and Rose's apartment, tangling with the police department and landing Henry in jail because he is the source of the dream and is therefore arguably responsible for the damage they've perpetrated. Rose immediately throws Henry under the bus, urging for his imprisonment to shift the spotlight away from the fact that she created the dream serum and is responsible for bringing the cartoons to life. While Henry is imprisoned, his wife rides a wave of public success as the scientist with a plan to eradicate the menaces; her eye particularly aimed at our heroine, Jessie, who seems to be smitten with the shamed professor who dreamed her.

The film is absurd, it's hilarious, it's brilliant. There are a number of sight gags based on the fact that even though Jessie and her pursuers are now fully realized flesh and blood organisms, they can still seemingly only communicate through speech bubbles. In one particularly fun scene, a courtroom stenographer asks to have one of Jessie's speech bubbles turned so he can see and record its contents. Who Wants To Kill Jessie? is goofy in the best possible way, and regardless of how silly or strange things get, never stoops to insulting the audience's intelligence. 

Not even a crematorium furnace can destroy Superman!

Who Wants To Kill Jessie? is directed by Václav Vorlícek, a celebrated film and television director who  largely made family films and comedic fantasy pictures throughout his career, including the cult classic The Girl On The Broomstick (1972). Our titular Jessie is played by actress/model Olga Schoberova, aka Olinka Berova, whom Hammer Film fans may recognize as Ayesha in the 1968 H. Rider Haggard appropriation The Vengeance Of She. She was married to actor/muscleman Brad Harris, who played one of the aforementioned Three Fantastic Supermen, and they appeared in an entry of the German Kommissar X films together (look for more on those later). Rose, or, Dr. Ruzenka Béranková in the original Czech, is played by Dana Medrická, who had a successful career in film and television until her death in the early 1980s. Henry, or Dr. Jindric Béranek, is played by veteran actor Jirí Sovák. The film was written by director Vorlícek and screenwriter Milos Macourek, who collaborated with Vorlícek a number of times, including on the aforementioned The Girl On The Broomstick.