The Fabulous Baron Munchausen

Zeman By Proxy

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen
aka Baron Prásil  
Czechoslovakia 1962
Directed by Karel Zeman
Second Run Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Many story spoilers.

Baron Prásil is the Czechoslovakian name for Baron Munchausen. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is the third of the six feature films by this wonderful director to utilise live actors pitched against various animation styles. It’s a film which was on TV a lot when I was a kid growing up in the 1970s but which seems to have dropped off the radar a bit over the last few decades. Like a lot of great films we were used to being exposed to back in the day, kids now, among them up and coming filmmakers of the future, just aren’t getting the opportunities to easily see the classics of cinema like they used to. For sure, there are still some modern classics shown but, honestly, TV stations are just not educating people with quality product like they should do in these dark times.

So, anyway, of the three Karel Zeman films I’ve watched since Christmas, this is probably my least favourite. That being said, it has all the usual Zeman charm in abundance and is certainly as inventive and entertaining a spectacle as his previous two features, for sure. This one is very similar, stylistically, to his previous cinema release, Invention For Destruction (aka The Fabulous World Of Jules Verne, reviewed here) and uses a lot of matte paintings and sets built which are based, somewhat, on Gustave Doré’s illustrations for one of the more popular 19th Century versions of the legends based on the real life Baron. The difference being that this one is shot in colour... although it’s not a colour film as is typically understood by that term these days. Rather, the live action scenes, starring actors such as Milos Kopecký (Munchausen), Rudolf Jelínek (Tony the moon man, who is actually not in any way such a thing) and Jana Brejchová (as Princess Bianca... although she was a bought woman sold to ‘The Sultan’ by pirates) and, indeed, the majority of the animations and drawings in the film, are obviously shot on monochrome stock and then tinted. The difference between the same process here than in most silent films where colour tinting was more common, being that sometimes a few colours are assigned to different sections of the screen simultaneously.

The film starts dramatically on Earth with shots of nature turning to aviation via butterflies, birds, various aeroplanes (including something like a jumbo jet) and then to rockets headed to the moon (the reality of which would not come to fruition for another seven years). Then, Tony the astronaut sees footprints on the moon. He follows them and finds the original rocket from Jules Verne’s From The Earth To The Moon and is then, astonishingly, greeted by the three central protagonists of that book who, like their companions, don’t need space helmets like Tony to be able to breath the atmosphere. Cyrano De Bergerac also greets them (he had some adventures on the moon in one of his literary incarnations, if memory serves... although my old English translation paperback of his lunar adventures is either up in the loft or donated to charity a couple of decades ago) and, lastly, Baron Munchausen adds his welcome.

The five of them obviously mistake Tony for a moon man and the good Baron decides to fly him back to Earth in his ‘star galleon’ (my term) flown by geese for Tony to see how Earth dwellers live. Of course, by the time they get to Earth the clock has flown back and the two have various of the Baron’s famous misadventures, picking up the ‘princess’ in the palace of The Sultan where, in a wonderful moment of satire, the Baron starts talking in comically abrupt woodwind sounds very similar to the sounds used by the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Tony remarks (in this translation, other versions referenced on the documentaries included are obviously taken from a much different subtitle translation) that the Baron’s conversational tones in this manner are... “Musical but hard to follow.” “The language of high diplomacy!” retorts the Baron and, yes, I couldn’t agree more.

And the adventure continues as the Baron and his two companions escape the sultan but, after using a smoke screen made up of Turkish tobacco, which everyone on the ship they are in puffs to summon up said smoke screen (even the ship’s figurehead has a puff), they end up in the belly of a giant fish and, later, during a battle scene, we also have a version of the famous cannon ball ride (there and back) so the Baron can gain the advantage of seeing what the enemy are up to. When Tony is slung into prison for stealing all the gunpowder for one of his scientific ‘fantasist’ inventions, the Baron lights the gunpowder which was hidden in a well in the castle for just such a purpose and the three of them are blown back to the moon.

It’s a nice flight of fancy from beginning to end and, along the way, you’ll see the usual Zeman inventiveness such as the Baron riding a sea horse which actually does have four legs with flippers for feet to swim with, accompanied by a swordfish on which the Baron hangs his clothes and dresses while riding said sea horse, a captivating but perhaps over used red smoke (the old coloured droplets in water trick) and even a battle being conducted like a piece of concert music.

Like I said, it’s not my favourite of his works but it’s still an excellent film and, like the other two Blu Rays in this series from Second Sight, there’s a hefty bunch of extras on the disc including a feature length documentary on the life and work of Zeman, which includes complimentary comments and interviews from some modern directors who have been influenced by Zeman’s works such as Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam (whose own, even more wonderful film of the Baron’s tales certainly stole a few things from this version, as well as others). These are found alongside a wonderful featurette by Michael Brooke of facts and figures about both the many and varied film and TV incarnations of the Baron’s adventures, plus his interesting insight into the musical score for this version. This featurette in particular was a real eye opener for me... I mean, we’ve all heard of the medical terms Munchausen Syndrome and Munchausen By Proxy but stuff like Munchausen By Internet was new to me and, well, I loved the mathematical uniqueness of Munchausen Numbers for sure. Although, how you discover something like that last, where a specific four figure number is broken down into separate digits, each number multiplied by a factor of itself and then added to the previous to end up with the sum being the original number you started out with, is beyond me.

And there you have it. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is certainly a fabulous film with a fabulous director and with another fabulous batch of extras from Second Sight. And now I’ll have to track down some more of this director’s work at some point soon. And also some more Czech cinema. I’ve seen a couple of other interesting films from Czechoslovakia in the last couple of weeks (which will show up in review on this site at some point fairly soon) and I’m really enjoying what I’m seeing from the cinema of this country. I’ll get back to you on those.