Ballad for the Bandit

There have been various film adaptations of Ivan Olbracht’s classic novel Nikola Šuhaj loupežník (Nikola Šuhaj, Outlaw). By far the most popular of these, however, is the film version of the cult musical by Brno’s Husa na provázku (Goose on a String) theatre – A Ballad for the Bandit (1978). The author of the updated version of the classic story about a rebel bandit was the banned dramatist and writer Milan Uhde, who had to hide behind a pseudonym – passing himself off as a theatre director called Zdeněk Pospišil. For the purposes of a musical spectacle, Uhde and the composer Miloš Štědron created songs inspired by folk templates, which quickly became popular during the “normalisation” era of Soviet entrenchment after the Warsaw Pact invasion. Olbracht’s original balladic story was geographically tied to Carpathian Ruthenia and to the time of the First World War. The adaptation, however, preserved the universal story of romantic love between the outlaw Nikola and the villager Eržika, while adding the topical dimension of an individual grappling with malevolent and unjust authority. The director Vladimír Sís used the original cast for the film version. Besides Miroslav Donutil (Nikola) and Iva Bittová (Eržika), who was only 18 years old at the time, Boleslav Polívka adds a distinctive tone to the film in the role of the slippery innkeeper Mageri. In his movie, Sís uses a “theatre within a theatre” to frame the action, whereby a group of young people with guitars (played by actors, of course) decide to retell the tale of the legendary bandit. Sís set the entire story in an outdoor theatre (Andělská hora near Karlovy Vary), which is complemented not only by audience members (who sometimes even join in the action) but also by the popular country group Zelenáči. With the aid of cinematographer Viktor Růžička, Sís succeeded in marrying the specific poetics of a Western with the timeless qualities of a legendary piece of theatre, which since the 1970s has for the most part remained a timeless story about the desire for freedom.