Jindrich Polák – Zítra vstanu a oparím se cajem AKA Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea (1977)

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This is unimaginable today, but on Saturday 16 January 1982, BBC2 showed an ultra-obscure subtitled Czech film in an early enough slot (9.35pm) to garner a decent-sized audience – “decent-sized” equating to “many times larger than BBC4’s wildest dreams”, given that Britain had only three television channels at the time (for the record, it was up against Match of the Day on BBC1, and the small-screen premiere of Capricorn One on ITV, a somewhat sci-fi heavy night). The British cult reputation of Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea stems almost entirely from that screening, since apart from a brief London Film Festival outing in 1978 it was never distributed in Britain either theatrically or on video, and consequently doesn’t appear in any of the standard reference books. This led to such widespread ignorance that I once saw a writer citing it as an example of an impenetrable arthouse film, purely because of its title.

In actual fact, it’s a comedy. And a very funny one, for the most part, albeit not without some of the self-conscious wackiness that seems to pervade a great many mainstream Czech comedies – though it has more than enough inspired moments and genuinely smart ideas to compensate. Chief among them is its time-bending premise, which recalls that of Back to the Future Part II and the recent low-budget US indie effort Primer, though this is merely an accident of viewing order: the Czech film was made many years earlier.

Assuming I’ve got the plot straight, it runs broadly along these lines. A group of elderly Nazis has survived into the 1990s (thanks to anti-ageing pills of unspecified provenance), and is therefore in a position to take advantage of the miraculous invention of the Universum company – which offers time travel to school parties and rich American tourists, on condition that they are passive observers throughout (they’re not even allowed to leave the craft, which lands in the specified era after an initial blast into orbit). The Nazis, led by Klaus Abard (Jirí Sovák), plan to disobey this cardinal rule by landing in Germany on December 8, 1944, with the aim of offering Hitler and his associates a hydrogen bomb that their associates have purloined from the Americans – the idea being that Hitler will shatter his opposition with a single blow, and the Nazis’ dream of a thousand-year Reich will become a reality.

To this end, Abard and his associates bribe pilot Karel Bureš (Petr Kostka), who is up to his eyeballs in debt and quite prepared to turn a blind eye to the true purpose of their scheme. However, on the morning of the mission, Karel chokes to death on a bread roll before the horrified eyes of his brother Jan – who, being an identical twin (and, happily, also a trained pilot), ends up impersonating Karel (largely because he fancies his girlfriend) and flying instead. This naturally causes complications for Abard and co., not least after they end up in Nazi Germany in 1941 and find a triumphalist Hitler in no mood to take their offer seriously. So far so straightforward, but once the mission has gone pear-shaped, Jan tries to put things right (in the “thwarting their evil plan” sense as opposed to Karel’s “help them succeed” one) by going backwards and forwards in time, on each occasion landing fractionally in advance of events depicted earlier in the film. He then attempts to influence them in the desired direction – but not always entirely successfully…

It is to director Jindrich Polák and co-writer Miloš Macourek’s great credit that none of this is anything like as confusing on screen as it was to synopsise. They make frequent use of memorable visual cues to aid orientation (not least the tea-scalding motif of the title), assuming that our own sense of history will be stronger than that of the crudely sterotyped rich American tourist Patrick (the name of the equally moronic robot in Polak’s earlier sci-fi effort Icarus XB-1), who professes ignorance of Waterloo and only lights up when he wonders whether he’s misheard ‘Watergate’.

The budget didn’t stretch to time-trips outside Nazi Germany, but we get an impression of what the other tours are like from a series of outlandish costumes sported by stewardesses, ranging from a Cleopatra outfit for ancient Egypt to the Raquel Welch fur bikini treatment for the stone age. Talking of visual wit, the opening credits are superb – they’re set against a backdrop of cruelly manipulated footage of the real Hitler, making him appear to dance rhythmically, smooth his hair repeatedly and obsessively and generally make a tit of himself, often in reverse motion. Not only is this laugh-out-loud funny in itself, it also neatly encapsulates the film’s theme and subject in a single short sequence. Saul Bass it most definitely isn’t, but it follows his principles.

The performances are broad but effective – Petr Kostka particularly impressive as the two Bureš brothers, having to portray not just each (very different) twin but also Jan pretending to be Karel and not quite hitting his marks. And although it’s somewhat jarring to hear Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler et al speaking Czech rather than German, the relevant actors are no slouches in the lookalike department – František Vicena’s Hitler being especially convincing.

For all its cult reputation, I can’t make any great claims for this film being any kind of lost classic, but it’s certainly bonkers enough to justify all the fond memories. And it also joins that select group of time-travel films that addresses the paradox at the heart of its subject head on – most, like The Terminator, prefer to skim over gaping logical holes in the hope that audiences will be too thrilled by the all-stops-out action to notice. If Polák’s earlier Icarus XB-1 has more to offer posterity, Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea is far stronger in terms of intentional laughs – quite apart from possessing one of the cinema’s all-time-great titles. And for this alone it was well worth reviving. — Film Journal

Tomorrow.I'll.Wake.Up.and.Scald.Myself.With.Tea.1977.576p.Bluray.AAC.x264-LAA.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 34mn
Size:	2.61 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	790x576
Aspect ratio:	1.372
Frame rate:	24.000 fps
Bit rate:	3 755 kb/s
Audio
#1:	Czech 2.0ch AAC LC @ 123 kb/s
#2:	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 80.5 kb/s (Commentary with Kat Ellinger, Jonathan Owen and Mike White)

https://nitro.download/view/FBE0E6D85272884/Tomorrow.I’ll.Wake.Up.and.Scald.Myself.With.Tea.1977.576p.Bluray.AAC.x264-LAA.mkv

Language(s):Czech
Subtitles:English