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Lemonade Joe is a sweet-natured Czechoslovakian spoof of Hollywood westerns. Hero Lemonade Joe (Carl Fiala) is so named because he refuses to drink the "hard stuff" when he saunters into the local saloon. The plot exaggerates all the supposedly standard cowboy cliches, including dance hall girls with golden hearts, masked rustlers, and the sundown showdown. Halfway through, director Oldrich Lipsky (a graduate of Prague's Satirical Theatre) has nowhere further to go and begins repeating himself--then finds that he has to take certain plot threads seriously in order to expedite a happy ending. Nonetheless, the overall cheerfulness and virtuosity of the project won Lemonade Joe plenty of critical praise in 1966 (the year of its American release, though it actually was made two years earlier).