Original title: Adéla jeste nevecerela; aka: Adele’s Dinner
The peculiar title hides a rather charming Czech fantasy film directed by Oldrich Lipský who had scored a worldwide hit with the musical parody Limonádový Joe aneb Konská opera/Lemonade Joe (1964). Where Joe had taken aim at that bastion of American culture the western, Adele turns its satirical gaze on another staple of American popular literature, the detective. Here the heroic flatfoot is Nick Carter, a private detective created by Ormond G. Smith and John R. Coryell for the 13-part serial The Old Detective’s Pupil; or, The Mysterious Crime of Madison Square published in New York Weekly from 18 September 1886, predating the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes who wouldn’t make it to print until December 1887. Carter had been hugely popular in the early 20th century, headlining his own magazine Nick Carter Weekly but by 1915 the title had ceased publication as the public fell out of love with its hero. Carter’s fortunes were revived in the 1930s with the publication of Nick Carter Detective Magazine and novels featuring the detective were published regularly until the 1950s. He was reborn again in the 1960s as a James Bond-like secret agent in a series of over 260 novels published until the early 1990s. The books were never credited to any particular author, the pretence being that they were written by Carter himself.
Carter featured in a series of French serial between 1908 and 1912 with Pierre Bressol in the title role and a pair of French feature films, Nick Carter va tout casser (1964) and Nick Carter et le trèfle rouge (1965) with Eddie Constantine as Carter. Hollywood made three Carter adaptations, Nick Carter, Master Detective (1939), Phantom Raiders (1940) and Sky Murder (1940) where he was played by Walter Pidgeon while Columbia, unable to afford the rights to the original character, made a serial about Carter’s newly minted son Chick Carter, Detective (1946). In 1972, Robert Conrad starred as Carter in a TV pilot The Adventures of Nick Carter that never made it to full series status. Lipský’s film is, at the time of writing, the most recent adaptation, Carter having rather fallen out of favour with the general public over the years.
The film begins at the turn of the nineteenth century with a great opening sequence in which the unflappable Carter (Michal Docolomanský, who would have made a fantastic Holmes) uses a mix of gadgets and ingenuity to thwart three attempts on his life without ever leaving his desk. The bulk of he story finds him travelling from New York to Prague where he’s engaged to investigate the disappearance of what turns out to be a dog, an investigation that teams him up with local cop Commisar Ledvina (Rudolf Hrusínský) and brings him face to face with an old adversary, the mad scientist Baron Rupert von Kratzmar, aka The Gardener (Milos Kopecký) who has bred a carnivorous plant named Adele that he’s trained to kill whenever it hears Bernhard Flies’ lullaby Schlafe, mein Prinzchen.
As much an homage to silent cinema as to classic detective stories, Adele isn’t a subtle film but it is a huge amount of fun. There are echoes of the Pink Panther films in its broad, often slapstick but also very funny knockabout humour. Carter and Ledvina spend much of the early stages of the film getting riotously drunk sampling the beer at as many of Prague’s hostelries as than can manage and the film is full of silly sight gags, including Carter handcuffing a cutting from Adele when he takes it into custody and his collection of strange sub-Bondian steampunk gadgets. At one point he takes to the air using a winged cloak and a set of miniature rotor blades that emerge from his hat, a mode of transport similar to that used by the eponymous detective in the later animated TV series Inspector Gadget (1983-1986). Carter is a shameless name-dropper and is possessed of seemingly superhuman strength though it turns out that he’s actually rather useless despite all his cocksure arrogance. The action all culminates in cinema’s only and therefore funniest bicycle/car/wheelbarrow/hot air balloon/pedal-powered aircraft chase. It certainly gives lie to the still sometimes expressed belief that East European films are relentlessly dour, worthy and humourless.
Adele and many of Carter’s gadgets were animated by the great Jan Svankmajer. Adele is a memorably grotesque creation, complete with tongue, that writhes and foams as it approaches its unwary victims. Elsewhere Svankmajer relates The Gardener’s lurid past in a brief but marvellous animated insert. Killer plants have been something of a staple of horror and science fiction film and television. Womaneater (1958), Little Shop of Horrors (1960 and 1986), The Day of the Triffids (1963), Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) (with its killer vine), The Avengers episode Man-Eater of Surrey Green (1965) and Please Don’t Eat My Mother! (1973) all featured memorable examples and there have been plenty of others. Adele is one of the best of this particular strain of screen “monsters” thanks in no small part to Svankmajer’s outstanding work.
The film ends with Carter boarding the Orient Express bound for Egypt to investigate the disappearance of the Cheops pyramid, setting the stage for a sequel that sadly never happened. Had Lipský made more adventures of Nick Carter it could have been a fun franchise to complement the increasingly extravagant Bond films but it was not to be. What we’re left with is a beautifully photographed (by Jaroslav Kucera) and wonderfully silly romp that overflows with inventive set-pieces, boasts strong performances and great attention to period detail. It could be just the film to show to those who still harbour that prejudice against East European cinema and who need convincing that it’s not as bleak and severe as they might believe.
The EOFFTV Review 