. The manic comedy duo of Jirí Voskovec and Jan Werich, key inspirations for the Czech New Wave, originally gained fame through their Liberated Theater, which, as the novelist Josef Skvorecky wrote, “molded Dadaism, circus, jazz, Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and American vaudeville into a new art form. They created a kind of intellectual-political musical.” Their films were similarly anarchic, a never-again-matched cross of Laurel and Hardy or Wheeler and Woolsey with political agitprop and structuralist chaos. Heave Ho! is recognized as possibly their finest achievement, a tongue-in-cheek send-up of both Hollywood happy endings and Soviet workers-utopia montage. A good-hearted businessman (Werich) loses his milk-selling empire to a scheming industrialist, and joins forces with an unemployed labor leader (Voskovec) to fight the power. With musical numbers, a burgeoning romance, slapstick, and cinematic in-jokes (including parodic references to King Vidor's Our Daily Bread and Eisenstein's The General Line), Heave Ho! hits high and low, and everywhere in between.