Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (1977)

 

Director: Jindřich Polák

Screenplay: Milos Macourek and Jindrich Polák

Based on a story by Josef Nesvadba

Cast: Petr Kostka as Jan Bures / Karel Bures; Jirí Sovák as Klaus Abard; Vladimír Mensík as Rolf Kraus; Vlastimil Brodský as Ing. Bauer; Marie Rosulková as Shirley White; Otto Simánek as Patrick White; Valerie Chmelová as Helena

Ephemeral Waves

Patrick, it's Hitler! Yes it is Hitler! Patrick, you must take a picture of me with him!

That title immediately raises your eyebrows doesn't it? Barring the suspicion, viewing the film multiple times, that the hot beverage Jan Bures (Petr Kostka) scolds himself with may actually be coffee, this title fits a Czeck sci-fi film that, released the same year as Star Wars, exists in an entirely different spectrum of the genre from the Soviet template. In the seventies interpretation of the future, time travel is possible and is a popular tourist activity even if limited in airports it is available at, one such station at Prague. Rather than the concerns of any schoolchildren being eaten by a dinosaur on a class trip, the greater problem is that a group of former Nazis, sustained by anti-aging pills, have planned to travel back to 1944 with a stolen hydrogen bomb from the United States' military museums. Bribing a time travel pilot with the intention of presenting this weapon of mass destruction to Adolf Hitler himself, it is small enough to fit into a briefcase and could drastically change history immediately. However the pilot, Jan's twin brother Karel (also Kostka), chokes to death in the morning on a bread roll and, deciding to fake the position, Jan finds himself in the boots of his brother, a womanising fascist sympathiser and pulled into this conspiracy to change history for the Third Reich's favour.

The film is a comedy, though it is not a succession of gags, instead a sustained narrative which will even have moments of seriousness when it talks about World War II. It will however show its hand in the humour, how amusing it is, when the pre-credits sequence involving the Nazis plotting even having a parrot mimicking "Heil Hitler!". Or that the opening credits, re-mixing real monochrome documentary footage, reinterprets over a seventies jazz funk track Hitler moving his hands in time to it like a dance choreography, as with the goose-stepping tropes. The film mercifully avoids broadness, instead playing the humour dry even with the more broad sci-fi aspects. It is of its era, from air stewardesses wearing fur bikinis or full France Sun King era dresses, but also in good ways such as the model made rocket launch sequences looking like a Thunderbirds sequence. And plenty of moments feel timeless, especially in what the tone of this unique premise is. The absurdity is in how, to save the world, Jan will find himself going back in time, with doubles of people involved and alternative timelines being created, with the humour coming from a variety of slapstick, comic timing and pure corpse humour, all ramping up when the first time Jan enters World War II, the Nazis hijacking the rocket ship made the gaff of travelling back to 1941 to a less welcome reception of being there to save the Reich.

The film is playful in telling its plot. Little gags build - like the hired car whose boot keeps popping up, or the space age dish cleaner which eats away pottery and junk food - whilst eventually you are in the scenario of Nazis meeting their younger selves, doubles killing their younger selves off because two cannot sustain one pay check, and simple mistakes like picking up the wrong briefcase. This manages even an action chase sequence at one point, having acquired period suitable Nazis vehicles let alone uniforms, and the one really broad joke, two middle age Americans who end up on the hijacked ship, has the delightful humour of a Soviet film parodying the United States. Especially when the Battle of Waterloo is unheard of, but Watergate is, those two characters, still lovable but entirely not speaking in English, feel fascinating in themselves as a playful jab in the ribs against the other superpower to the Soviet Union.

Everything, including the film's title, one of the best ever written down in the English translation¹, has a meaning in the production, and every little detail has a weight to it, even something as trivial as the "freeze" spray, continually used, which turns a person blue faced, frozen in place and gurning incoherently, leading to numerous incidents of it being used including an unfortunate attempt to bend one victim's leg. The situations of the film add to how original it still is, especially as it is still legitimate in its concepts of alternative history, Nazism, time travel and a slight streak of surrealism felt through.

This creativity means as well that, in tackling Hitler and Nazi Germany, they are undoubtedly villains to parody, but it never becomes broad stereotypes and even manages to have a haunting sincerity. When depicting Hitler and his inner circle, this leads to a sequence where, with the many items brought to this timeline, Hitler acquires a visual projector from the future which shows the downfall of Nazi Germany, of Berlin bombed into desolation and Russian troops at his door, which is a stunning science fiction sequence, arguably one of the best of the genre for the complexity of the emotions within it. That a comedy sci-fi film, with real footage including corpses used among that documentary footage, manages to balance out with this striking tonal shift for a moment, and succeed, is a huge testament to the production, more so as this is a film in one scene managing to give sympathy to a man who is undoubtedly a monster in history for completely justifiable reason, breaking down when he sees his fate is inevitable.

From even that scene, there is still the madness of multiples of characters, the punch line of having a trampoline on top of a tall building's roof leading to multiple tragedies at one, and the inevitable problem of trying to tell someone, even yourself, that you come from another timeline merely produces a blank reaction or leads to the truck driver you are hitching a ride with booting you out for being mad. Especially in the final act, when Tomorrow... manages to make all of this work, everyone from the actors onscreen to the production crew succeed. Petr Kostka as Jan, and his brother and duplicate, has a lot by himself to work with, and succeeds as the everyman stuck in this bizarre journey, whilst everyone else working in front and behind the camera manages to make the film work in every cog and twist.

Tomorrow... was once an obscurity, with the additionally strange history that, back in the day on British television on January 16th 1982, BBC Two screened the film for its first and only British screening at the time, to an audience which, decades after, reflected on this screening with wonder and curiosity as it took place on a night where, with only three channels to choose from, BBC One's regular airing of the football (soccer) programme Match of the Day was delayed². Preserved and available to a wide audience decades later, Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea is a worthy one-off even in mind to Czechoslovakian cinema, Czeck and Slovakian filmmaking alike, from this era being filled with countless unique films like this as original.

 

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1) Considering as well the director worked on a children's film a decade later, translated in English as Merry Christmas Octopus (1987), Czeck and Slovakian cinema knew how to invent creative film titles.

2) As documented in this review by Andy Goulding, from June 16th 2012 for Blue Print Review.