Jindřich Polák’s 1977 sci-fi comedy Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (Zítra vstanu a opařím se čajem) has garnered its fair share of international admirers over the years – many of them in the UK, where a lone television screening of the film, one night in January 1982 in BBC2’s ‘Film International’ slot, made it the object of lingering cult fascination. For those night-time channel-hoppers who caught the film unsuspectingly in 1982, as for those who have discovered it through its more recent reappearance on DVD and Blu Ray, its appeal evidently lies in its outrageous humour, dizzyingly complex farce, quirky futuristic fantasies and bizarre storyline, revolving around identical twin brothers caught up in a nefarious plot to travel through time and give a nuclear bomb to Hitler. Fewer of the film’s admirers, one suspects, have appreciated it as a sobering exposé of resurgent fascism. 

Yet this latter dimension – the film’s supposed ‘serious’ message, its grounding in contemporary social and political realities – was repeatedly asserted in its original publicity and press coverage upon release in Czechoslovakia. As I shall try to show through the following survey of the politics of Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea, the film’s institutional and promotional ‘packaging’, together with its actual content, illustrate the politically oriented demands and expediencies under which filmmakers laboured in normalisation-era Czechoslovakia, including the makers of nominal entertainment films. At the same time, the film displays that ‘polysemic’ political character that the scholar Helena Srubar has analysed in other works by Jindřich Polák from the normalisation era – his fantasy children’s TV series Pan Tau (1969-1978) and The Visitors (Návštěvníci, 1983-1984).[1] Here, as there, the tendentiously ‘correct’ representations of communist cultural politics contain a subversive shadow, the potential for resistant counter-readings.

The long cycle of so-called ‘crazy comedy’ films produced in Czechoslovakia throughout the 1970s, to which Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea belongs, has been classed as part of the ‘ideologically neutral’ wing of the cinema of normalisation.[2] Such films thus stand apart from the overtly political, regime-supporting works that were also produced – if in smaller numbers and generally with considerably less popularity – during this era of re-imposed orthodoxy that followed the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion and the eradication of Prague Spring liberalism. With ‘[a]ll satirical elements…now subordinated to regime ideology’, comedy in the 1970s became principally a means of escape from the ‘tedium and greyness of the current social situation’.[3] If the ‘escapist character’ of ‘mass entertainment’ films had (in Czechoslovakia as elsewhere) a ‘complicit’, establishment-supporting function all its own, providing such distractions as might tether their viewers more securely to the prevailing reality, these films were also often politically conformist in a more obvious sense, the ‘ideological neutrality’ of their content only ‘apparent’.[4]

Lukáš Skupa, in an informative essay on the institutional handling of comedy films during the ‘revival’ years of normalisation cinema in the late 1970s and early 1980s, explores the shifts and relationships between the contrasting models of ‘pure humour’ (čistý humor), concerned solely to entertain, and ‘humour in service’ (služebný humor), designed to serve the ruling ideology and inculcate correct moral-political lessons.[5] In a clear example of the kind of political ‘service’ expected from filmmakers, Skupa notes that the ‘demands placed on film production’ in the wake of the 15th Communist Party Congress of 1976 included ‘setting in the foreground questions of the present and the struggle of working people for socialism, progress and peace; more resolutely and convincingly showing the superiority of the socialist system and way of life’ and ‘more effectively fighting for the idea of communism against bourgeois ideologies and remnants’.[6] Tomáš Gruntorád, in his fascinating study of the production (and non-production) of horror films in normalisation cinema, makes the similar point that while the film industry leadership stressed the ‘importance’ of making ‘entertaining’ films ‘in the widest possible genre palette’, it also unrelentingly demanded that films’ content be connected to ‘social reality and serious themes’ – themes that were of course expected to be spun in ways consistent with ‘Party cultural politics’.[7]

Gruntorád notes the recurrent normalisation-era ‘strategy’ at Barrandov Studios of emphasising how the fictional worlds of genre films were in fact ‘connected to reality and infused with a message’.[8] In regard to Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea specifically, Gruntorád quotes from the studio’s 1977-1981 dramaturgical plan, which describes Polák’s film as using ‘the audience-pleasing form of the science-fiction comedy’ to try and draw viewers’ attention to ‘the prevalent and even increasing danger of fascism in today’s world’.[9] This was clearly a message in accord with the politics of the normalisation era, when the Czechoslovak regime intensified ‘the cult of the Great Patriotic War and the fight against fascism’ and played up the threat of a resurgent fascism from the West – ‘particularly from West Germany, depicted as the successor to the Nazi fascist state’.[10] Coming in the wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion, such discourse served as a means to glorify the Soviet Union and legitimise the interventionist policy known as the Brezhnev Doctrine. The utilisation of the theme of anti-fascism to endorse Czechoslovakia’s ‘fraternal’ subordination to the USSR is explicitly evident in the final moments of Otakar Vávra’s The Liberation of Prague (Osvobození Prahy, 1976) – the last in a trilogy of Second World War-themed ‘super-productions’ that count among the most prominent examples of openly political, propagandistic filmmaking during this period – in which the closing words declare the nation’s eternal, ‘blood-sealed’ friendship with the Soviet Union, which ‘gave us back freedom and peace’.

As for Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea, the heavyweight thematic sell of the dramaturgical plan was a line repeatedly reiterated in the film’s press coverage. A notice from the journal Lidová demokracie, marking the film’s completion, describes it as a warning about ‘any kind of fascism’ and quotes the following remarks by Polák: ‘Among the main characters of the film are people who still represent fascism in “classic” form. While they symbolise certain remains of the past, they are far from harmless. Today fascism perhaps exists predominantly in latent form, but it is no less dangerous for that.’[11] In an interview with the journal Kino, Polák affirms the seriousness of his film’s engagement with fascism – a subject against which comedy constitutes ‘one of the most effective weapons’.[12] Miloš Macourek, who co-wrote the film’s screenplay with Polák, discussed the film in somewhat lighter terms, declaring in an interview with Záběr that ‘My main ambition is to entertain people’, though even he ties the film to the real world by arguing that ‘we often come to recognise reality much better through absurdity than through any kind of precise description.’[13] The film’s lead actor Petr Kostka, interviewed in Film a divadlo, argues that ‘[I]n its subtext the film has a humanistic charge, fighting in a hitherto unaccustomed form against fascism’.[14] A spread in Film a doba reports that ‘the central theme of the film, shot in the genre of “black comedy”, is the societally grave and still current problem of fascism’.[15]

Tomáš Gruntorád questions how far such ‘explicitly defined messages’ were actually present in the genre films he cites, and how far they were ‘simply a pragmatically used strategy of the time to ensure the easier passage of material into production’ (or, likewise, to aid a smooth release and positive reception once a film was in the can).[16] What of Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea? Contemporaneous reviewers in the Czechoslovak press professed to discern the film’s message about the dangers of fascism, even when they felt that message was inadequately expressed. Jan Kliment, for instance, writes in Rudé právo that ‘[A]mong the film’s virtues are the fact that it is founded, in principle, on the serious idea of a warning about neo-Nazism, about the restorers and resurrectors of fascism, who unfortunately exist in our present time, who have learned nothing and can be taught nothing from the lessons of history. It is not certain though whether this serious idea can be communicated effectively enough to the viewer through this form that runs to farce, through this humorous approach.’[17] Reviewers, of course, might well have been taking their lead from the interpretive framing already established by the film’s makers, and we should certainly not discount the use of film criticism itself as a platform for officially dictated talking points – especially in the hands of a notorious mouthpiece of Party ideology like Kliment. Outside of these specific circumstances, can anyone really describe as a ‘truly engaged and timely’ struggle ‘against this danger’ of fascism (in Pravda’s words) any film that features, in its opening minutes, a parrot squawking ‘Heil Hitler’ and manipulated footage of the Fuhrer appearing to dance and do aerobics?[18]

As Polák acknowledged, the fascists here come in predominantly ‘classic’ form. The film begins in a luxurious villa somewhere in South America, where former SS officer Klaus Abard (Jiří Sovák) is conspiring with his fellow Nazi loyalists. The time period is the near future, but these superannuated remnants of the Third Reich live on in rude health thanks to anti-ageing pills. These conspirators plot out the film’s outlandish premise. Abard, together with engineer Bauer (Vlastimil Brodský) and henchman Kraus (Vladimír Menšík), will travel to Prague, where the Universum tour company runs sight-seeing expeditions into the past. Hijacking one of Universum’s spaceships-cum-time machines with the aid of pilot Jan Bureš (Kostka), the trio will return to the year 1944 and deliver a hydrogen bomb to Hitler, enabling Nazi Germany to win the War. Even before this plot brings us face to face with the Fuhrer himself in his wartime ‘Wolf’s Lair’ – gathered over maps with his senior officers, a carefully recreated rogues’ gallery – the film’s fascists are familiar bogeymen, literal Nazi members in the obligatory South American hideout. (The besuited, fine-living figures seen at the beginning of Polák’s film are intriguingly reminiscent of Gregory Peck’s white-suited incarnation of the exiled Josef Mengele in Franklin J. Schaffner’s Hollywood thriller The Boys from Brazil, another take on Nazi conspiracies to reverse the outcome of the war with sci-fi methods, but the near-contemporaneity of the two films – Polák’s film appearing in 1977, Schaffner’s in 1978 (and Ira Levin’s original novel of The Boys from Brazil in 1976) – suggests this was less a case of any direct influence than of a shared cultural imaginary.) Presented as they are in such familiar terms, these fascists feel less like portents of real and current dangers – or objects of sustained critical engagement – and more like stock villains raided from the cultural storehouse, to be recombined with other well-trodden tropes in the pastiche spirit of the crazy comedy.

If a satirical purpose is sometimes vaguely extractable from the Nazi-targeted gags – does, say, the Hitler-heiling parrot signify the parrot-like obedience inculcated by fascism? – the humour here is at heart blithely madcap, defiantly silly rather than polemically pointed. Notwithstanding Polák’s claim that the film’s comedy served him as a ‘weapon’, its tone is closer, perhaps, to Mel Brooks than Mikhail Romm – with whose caustically ironic documentary Ordinary Fascism (1965) Polák’s film was negatively compared by one reviewer.[19] Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up… leaves itself open to charges of unredeemed bad taste, of making flippant or irreverent use of such an officially hallowed theme. The Hitler-hydrogen-bomb premise even proves ultimately disposable, something of a MacGuffin: as the protagonists move between past and present, and as each return to the present yields a duplication of selves and a revision of events we have already seen, this premise cedes place to the bizarre complications and farcical possibilities that amass with the manipulation of time.

Yet while this may indeed be much more a work of genre pleasures than a serious dissection of contemporary political dangers, it does strew the narrative with a number of politically tendentious elements. Most notably, the film’s respective protagonist and chief antagonist – identical twin brothers Jan and Karel Bureš, both played by Petr Kostka – form an implicit central opposition between progressive, socialist characteristics on the one side, and capitalist, ‘Western’ or fascist tendencies on the other. Jan, the hero, is a modest, retiring, thoroughly decent figure, employed in the model-socialist role of engineer (he designs rockets). By the end of the film, he will have restored all moral order not only by his complex re-orderings of time and of his and his twin’s identities, but also by having the Nazi plotters arrested and jailed – the informer as socially responsible ideal. In contrast to Jan, Karel, employed in the more glamorous profession of spaceship pilot, is financially avaricious, womanising, dashing in a feckless, caddish way: in an alternative political and moral universe, he might have been a sci-fi James Bond. It is Karel, of course, who conspires with the Nazis’ plot, upholding the quintessential Brezhnev-era alignment of fascism and ‘Western’ tendencies (even if, as a Czech, he also presents a ‘conventionalised image of the internal enemy’).[20] His involvement in the plot may be more a matter of financial self-interest than ideological commitment, but this at least suggests the easier susceptibility of an amoral, ‘Western’ materialism to the clutches of fascism.

The association of Western capitalism with fascism or military aggression is present in other details. Early on in the story, as Jan makes breakfast, a radio announces that ‘the socialist states have ensured the success of the Peace Conference’, and, immediately after, that a bomb has been stolen from a military museum in Washington. These details are fleeting, but their import is clear: the socialist world represents peace, while the capitalist world, exemplified by the USA, represents war. The future world in which the film is set may be one of peaceful co-operation: it is significant, perhaps, that the look of the time-travelling spaceship was consciously modelled on the technical features of the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz space mission, that joint American-Soviet venture that symbolised the cooperatively-minded ‘détente’ era.[21] But, as in Polák’s earlier sci-fi classic Icarus XB 1 (Ikarie XB 1, 1963) and his brilliant TV time-travel opus The Visitors, this harmonious future does not preclude a critical glance back at the dangers of a warmongering past. If this side of past history is identified as predominantly capitalist, then capitalism itself is identified as past history (the US being represented by a military museum).

Such political commentary barely distracts us from the fun. But, in one sobering scene, the film actually delivers on its makers’ promise of dealing seriously with fascism, though with unsettling and ambiguous results. This comes during the standout sequence when the three Nazi plotters return to the Second World War to deliver their nuclear trump card to Hitler – together with hero Jan, flight attendant Helena and an American tourist couple, all caught up unsuspectingly in the plot. But the plotters have returned not, as planned, to the year 1944, but to 1941 – the very day after Pearl Harbour – and thus a victory-flushed Fuhrer listens with incomprehension as Abard announces his plan of saving the Third Reich from impending doom. A farcical mix-up in which the black briefcase supposedly containing the bomb is opened to reveal the female tourist’s frilly nightwear does little to further persuade Hitler or his henchmen, but as the plotters are being hustled out – for torture and execution – Abard has a ‘final surprise’ up his sleeve: a small film-projection device showing how the war will end if the bomb is not used. Watching with horror as this irrefutable documentary evidence of his defeat unfolds, Hitler angrily clears the room but then, alone, switches the device back on, aghast but transfixed at the images of the Soviet capture of Berlin and the Nuremberg Trials.

In this scene Polák makes good on an opportunity that he claims ‘excited’ him about the project: the chance to ‘confront’ Hitler with ‘the consequences of his politics’, to stand him ‘face to face with the historical truth of the succeeding years’.[22] In this ‘sharply satirical confrontation between a Nazism victorious and a Nazism later deservedly crushed’, as critic J. Strnad puts it, we get a satisfying moment of comeuppance and a revelation of fascism ‘in all its fury and cruelty’.[23] From an official point of view, the scene gains an added sense of rectitude from highlighting the Soviet responsibility for that victory, with its triumphant images of soldiers storming the Reichstag with Red Flag aloft. Soviet-style communism, after all, is constructed as fascism’s natural, ever-vigilant opponent.

Yet this key moment of engagement with fascism is not as straightforwardly polemical as the various cited statements of the film’s intent might have suggested. Eva Hepnerová was right to remark that this manifestation of Hitler ‘paralysed with horror’ at the ‘shots of devastated German cities and blighted people […] acquires a tragic dimension’.[24] This is enhanced by the accompaniment of the doleful song ‘Tango Notturno’ (sung by actress Pola Negri, a favourite of Hitler’s, and taken from her 1937 Nazi-era melodrama of the same name) and by the performance of František Vičena as Hitler, which is expressive enough but resists the true raving grotesquerie we might expect from the film’s genre and the personality involved (ironically, Vičena’s crazy-comedy Hitler is more restrained than Gunnar Möller’s historical-drama Hitler in Vávra’s Second World War trilogy). This depiction of the Fuhrer in his raw shock and devastation anticipates the ‘tragic pathos’ and ‘humanising’ portrayal seen later in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s extremely popular, but controversial, Downfall (2004), though it also recalls an earlier film scripted by Miloš Macourek, Zbyněk Brynych’s I, Justice (Já, spravedlnost, 1967), a more sober blend of Nazi history and fantasy in which Hitler – shown to have survived after the end of the War – is portrayed as the helpless, tortured captive of a group of vigilantes posing as supporters.[25] If less provocatively unconventional than the depiction in I, Justice, Polák’s film here courts the same risk of a sneaking ‘sympathy for the devil’, and thus possibly blunts the didactic clarity of its anti-fascist message.

However we read this moment, it certainly sits oddly with the rest of the film. Distinguished critic Jaromír Blažejovský, in his review for Rovnost, objected generally that ‘Hitler and the Second World War’ were ‘motifs too serious to be served up alongside the simple plots and traditional gags of the Czech comedy arsenal’.[26] But what particularly discomforted him about Polák’s approach was its attempt to show us the ‘real Hitler’, whose ‘authenticity’ is ‘underlined’ by the use of documentary footage: ‘shots of the capture of the Reichstag by Soviet soldiers,’ Blažejovský writes, ‘simply do not belong in a crazy sci-fi’.[27] This scene, those shots, do make for a jarring tonal shift, a point at which – as Hepnerová’s put it – the film ‘exceeds’ the boundaries of genre.[28] Might we see something significant, even subversive, in this very sense of rupture?

Besides the abrupt darkening of tone, the screening of the war footage also represents a sharp shift from fantasy to reality, the piercing intrusion of unstaged actuality into stylised fiction. This is reality in all its traumatic and unassimilable power, defying both the representational norms that the film has set for itself and the delusions of Hitlerian ideology. Such a reading is supported by the contrast between the ‘straight’ use of the documentary images here and the use of historical footage during the opening credits, where real scenes of Hitler and the Nazis are comically reversed and replayed – in other words flagrantly manipulated. Could the film be implicitly criticising the distortions and fabrications enforced upon filmmakers during the normalisation era? The truth that tears through simulation here is a rupture enacted upon, or against, the film itself – a film that is in certain ways a characteristic product of that very era. While granting that the terms in which those documentary shots present the real are slanted to pro-Soviet narratives (the Red Army as sole opponent of the Nazis, the conspicuous lack of reference to the Holocaust), we might even discern a gesture back to the New Wave era and its commitment to authenticity and taboo-breaking truths. Though not a New Wave filmmaker himself, Polák had embraced that commitment in an earlier film about the Second World War, Riders of the Sky (Nebeští jezdci, 1968), which took advantage of late-1960s freedoms to depict the hitherto-tabooed history of Czech and Slovak RAF pilots.

Up to now this piece has treated the film’s genre stylings in the same manner that its institutional and press statements did – as ‘audience-pleasing’ packaging for ‘important’ themes. But do not those ‘crazy sci-fi’ elements have important meanings of their own? The notion of returning to the past and tampering with a given course of events might be considered inherently troubling from the viewpoint of established power, allowing us as it does to muse on the prospect of history having taken a different course, of certain political formations having never existed, and giving the lie to the idea that any such formation is inevitable and predestined. The time-travel motif becomes even more politically pointed when fused, as it is here, with twentieth-century history. Indeed, the premise of going back in time to give a bomb to Hitler is a kind of narrative ‘evil twin’ of the much more familiar sci-fi trope of going back to kill Hitler, and hanging in the air here is the scope for further, unmentioned manipulations of the past. The film ends happily, with all potential dangers avoided and positive outcomes assured through the breathless interventions of hero Jan, but wouldn’t a yet more desirable outcome have been the killing of Hitler and aversion of the Second World War itself? Would that, however, also comprise a happy end for Soviet communism, which established its grip on East and Central Europe as a consequence of the war?

The very inventiveness, indeed relentlessness, with which the film explores the malleability of the past helps incite a similarly imaginative process on the part of the viewer, while the ultimately positive outcome wrought by these manipulations of time (the prospect of romance has opened up for the hitherto single Jan, another incarnation of Jan takes the place of the dead, villainous twin Karel) encourage us to reflect on positive ways of changing the given. The effect might well have been the kindling of historical fantasies unwelcome to the authorities. This was the case with one British aficionado of the film, who offers the following take (admittedly arrived at without the aid of English subtitles!) in an IMDB review: ‘Jan foils an evil plot thanks to his being in the right spot five minutes…before the right time and ingeniously managed to cover up Karel’s untimely death as well. Now, if only he had gone back in time to try to stop the Soviets from marching into Prague in the 1940s or 1968 or whenever…’[29]

As noted earlier, Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea joins a range of other Czechoslovak crazy comedies in melding a state-supportive message with implicitly critical or oppositional elements. How far were such subversive qualities, like the fan reading cited above, consciously intended by these films’ creators? The answers, such as they are, are mixed: Václav Vorlíček acknowledged that his and Macourek’s comic-strip fantasy Who Wants to Kill Jessie? contained a deliberate satire of ‘Communist Party’ thought-policing, while Polák would reject a fan’s interpretation of The Visitors as an allegory of slipping across Cold War borders.[30] One thing though is certain, and hopefully illustrated by this case study: even the rigid, overbearing politics of the normalisation era could not contain the explosive energies and implications of the crazy comedy.

I wish to thank my co-participants in the webinar series The Normalized, the Normalizers and Their Cinemas, hosted by CEFRES, Prague, and organised and moderated by Anastasia Mamaeva (https://cefres.cz/en/seminars/the-normalized-the-normalizers-and-their-cinemas). The illuminating discussion that followed my paper ‘Message in a Teacup: Normalisation, Jindřich Polák and the Crazy Comedy’ has enriched the present piece, especially in regard to the points about time travel.

Thanks also to Kristýna Doležalová, Head of the Department of Film-Related Documents, Národní filmový archiv.

Notes:

[1] Helena Srubar, Ambivalenzen des Populären: Pan Tau und Co. Zwischen Ost und West (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 2008), pp.18-19.

[2] Brigita Ptáčková, ‘Hraný film v období normalizace (1970-1989)’, in Luboš Ptáček, ed., Panorama českého filmu, (Oloumoc: Rubico, 2000), p.158. The crazy comedy formula – i.e. wildly inventive genre-based comedies, often favouring sci-fi motifs and mixing elements of parody and farce – actually began in the 1960s and saw some of its most popular and distinguished examples produced in that decade, such as Oldřich Lipský’s Lemonade Joe (Limonadový Joe aneb koňská opera, 1964) and Vaclav Vorlíček’s Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (Kdo chce zabít Jessii?, 1966). For better or worse, though, the crazy comedy is considered specifically emblematic of the 1970s, or – as a remark quoted by Petra Hanáková has it – the ‘perverse oozing of the perverse times’ (Hanáková, p.111).

[3] Zdeněk Hudec and Andrea Novobilská, ‘Filmová komedie’, Panorama českého filmu, p.290.

[4] Ptáčková, p.157; Hudec and Novobilská, p.290; Hulík, Štěpán. Kinematografie zapomnění: Počátky normalizace ve Filmovém studio Barrandov (1968–1973) (Prague: Academia, 2011), p.291.

[5] Lukáš Skupa, ‘‘Rozesmát je málo! Česká filmová komedie v etapě ‘oživení’ normalizační kinematografie’, in Tereza Brdečková and Lukáš Skupa, Tajemství hradu v Karpatech & Jiří Brdečka (Prague: Limonádový Joe), 2018, p.190-192. Skupa’s analysis here draws on Petr Szczepanik’s study of comedy production in Továrna Barrandov: Svět filmařů a politická moc 1945-1970 (Prague: Národní filmový archiv, 2016), p.306.

[6] Ibid., p.193.

[7] Tomáš Gruntorád, ‘Horory po česku: Hybridní žánrová tradice v normalizační kinematografii (1969–1989)’ (MA thesis: Masaryk University, 2018), p.20; Skupa, op. cit.

[8] Gruntorád, op. cit.

[9] Ibid., p.21.

[10] Marie Černá, ‘The Eternal Legacy of the Great Patriotic War? The Political Instrumentalization of the Soviet Victory over Fascism and Its Utilization in Czechoslovakia after 1968 and in the Czech Republic Today’, Soudobé dějiny 29, no.3, p.735; Carol Skalnik Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation Against State (New York; London: Routledge, 2018), p.67.

[11] Polák, in ‘a.a.’, ‘Z našich ateliérů’, Lidová demokracie 32, no.228, 24.9.1976, p.5.

[12] Polák, in Eva Jelínková, ‘Vím, žese zítra opařím čajem’, Kino 31, no.20, 1976, p.6.

[13] Macourek, in Milena Kühnelová, ‘Zítra vstanu a opařím se čajem’, Záběr 9, no.14, 1976, p.3. In this interview Macourek also distinguishes his approach from the ‘psychological’ one on which Josef Nesvadba’s source text – the short story ‘Expedition in the Opposite Direction’ (‘Výprava opačným směrem’, 1962) – was founded. Thus, as Macourek accurately notes, the script of Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up… essentially took nothing from Nesvadba’s story other than the ‘idea that a person can go back to the past’.  

[14] Kostka, in Alois Joneš, ‘Vo fantastickej rakete’, Film a divadlo 20, no.17, 1976, unpaginated.

[15] ‘Nesvadba – Macourek – Polák: Zítra vstanu a opařím se čajem’, Film a doba 23, no.2, 1977, p.79.

[16] Gruntorád, p.21.

[17] Jan Kliment, ‘Čaj ne zrovna nejsilnější. Nová československá filmová komedie’, Rudé právo 57, no.200, 25.8.1977, p.5.

[18] ‘i.h.’ [Ivan Hrdina], ‘Cesta k filmovej komédii’, Pravda 58, no.175, 27.7.1977, p.5.

[19] J. Strnad, ‘Poměrně slabý čaj’, Práce 33, no.174, 26.7.1977, p.6.

[20] Michael Bukovanský, ‘Srovnání československých a amerických sci-fi filmů s tématem manipulace časem (1968-1989): Analýza narativu, žánru a propagandistických argumentů’ (BA dissertation, Palacký University Olomouc, 2015), p.45.

[21] Petra Fujdlová, ‘Žánr sci-fi komedie v české kinematografii v období normalizace’ (MA dissertation, Palacký University Olomouc, 2014), p.95.

[22] Jelínková, op. cit.

[23] Strnad, op. cit.

[24] Eva Hepnerová, ‘Píšeme o filmu Zítra vstanu a opařím se čajem’, Záběr 10, no.20, 1977, p.4.

[25] Karolin Machtans and Martin A. Ruehl, ‘Introduction’, in Machtans, Ruehl (eds), Hitler – Films from Germany: History, Cinema and Politics since 1945 (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp.13-14.

[26] Jaromír Blažejovský, ‘Přes hranice času i žánru’, Rovnost 92, no.186, 11.8.1977, p.5.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Hepnerová, op. cit.

[29] ‘jennyhor2004’, ‘Lighthearted and exuberant sci-fi comedy with a cutting comment about society’ (posted 1.2.2012), IMDB (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213322/reviews/?ref_=tt_urv_sm)

[30] Václav Vorlíček and Petr Macek, Pane, vy jste režisér! (Prague: Ikar, 2017), 39; Tomáš Baldýnský, ‘Jindřich Polák’, Reflex, 25.9.2003 (https://www.reflex.cz/clanek/causy/73922/jindrich-polak.html); Srubar, p.130.