Monthly Archives: January 2011

A Blonde in Love

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DVD cover of A Blonde in LoveSecond Run’s latest DVD is out today, complete with a 5,000-word booklet essay by yours truly. Compared with the research challenges posed by the two Jan Němec films (Diamonds of the Night and The Party and the Guests), this was a breeze to write: as one of the most internationally renowned of all the Czech New Wave films, A Blonde in Love has been extensively documented in English, not least in Miloš Forman’s autobiography Turnaround, and so there was lots of anecdotal material to draw on.

Aware that the booklet was the only extra (planned interviews with Forman and/or co-writer Ivan Passer had foundered in the face of a release deadline), I tried to come up with something that hadn’t been offered on other editions, and decided to devote the second half of the booklet to a full-blown reception study. Thanks to Václav Březina’s invaluable Lexikon českého filmu (broadly speaking, the Czech equivalent of Halliwell’s Film Guide, purchased on impulse in Prague circa 1997), I had access to contemporary box office figures, and was able to compare the film’s success with that of Forman’s other Czech films, and the other Czech titles in Second Run’s catalogue. Handily, the figures were in admissions, not Czech crowns, so direct comparisons could be made regardless of inflation:

  • A Blonde in Love – 2,255,858
  • The Firemen’s Ball – 1,348,547
  • Marketa Lazarová – 1,251,048
  • Romeo, Juliet and Darkness – 1,202,677
  • Black Peter – 978,142
  • Larks on a String – 750,803
  • Morgiana – 595,959
  • The Cremator – 590,242
  • Audition/Talent Competition – 545,161
  • Intimate Lighting – 345,129
  • The Valley of the Bees – 329,671
  • The Ear – 272,785
  • Adelheid – 258,247
  • Daisies – 213,782
  • Valerie and her Week of Wonders – 196,923
  • The Party and the Guests – 86,124
  • Diamonds of the Night – 76,001

(The figures are ticket sales between the original release and 1995 – I imagine they wouldn’t be that different today, unless any had a big theatrical reissue in the last fifteen years).

It’s interesting to see the very high placing for Romeo, Juliet and Darkness, which I always assumed was one of the more obscure titles in Second Run’s catalogue – and also that Larks on a String was a solid hit despite not opening in public until 1990 (though My Sweet Little Village had become an all-time box-office champ not much earlier, with a whopping 4,428,556 admissions, so Jiří Menzel clearly had a substantial following). And it’s amusing to see Diamonds of the Night at the bottom of the list, as it was officially registered as a box office hit on account of being sold abroad as part of a package containing far more lucrative titles – Czech Communist accounting regarded them as being equally successful even when they blatantly weren’t.

I also discovered that the film was pretty close to an unqualified critical hit in Britain (where it had a major impact on Lindsay Anderson, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach) and that it caused surprisingly big censorship rows in both Argentina and Australia. Looking at it now, it’s hard to believe that it was ever officially X-rated, though at the time this would only have prevented under-16s from seeing it, so the current (and fair) 15 certificate isn’t that different.

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