Home | Movies By Year | Movies from 1980
Waiter, Scarper!
Buy Waiter, Scarper! now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the movie. And once you've experienced the movie, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
'Waiter, Scarper!' is a 1981 Czechoslovak comedy film directed by Ladislav Smoljak. It is also known in English as 'Run, Waiter, Run!'.
Plot
At his high school reunion, the mild-mannered Dalibor Vrna learns, to his chagrin, that some of his former classmates own villas and take international vacations. He feels himself to be much less impressive; he manages a bookstore, drives a dilapidated three-wheeled Velorex, and is chronically short on cash, in part because, thanks to a weakness for women, he owes alimony to two ex-wives, and a third wife is worried they can't pay their bills. When a drunk stranger in a restaurant mistakes Vrna for a waiter, he takes it as a verdict on his life. He sees a gold lining in his fate, however, and starts slipping into restaurants, wearing the old tuxedo he wore to his high school reunion, and settling up the bills of diners whose real waiters have left them hanging. Soon he is able to afford a new car, though he has to hide it from the neighbors, lest they get suspicious, and drives to it in his old one. He can even afford to round up his children from their various mothers and take them on a skiing vacation. But soon the police and the press are onto him, not to mention a slew of indignant authentic waiters.
Production
The idea for the movie came to the scriptwriter Zdenk Svrk in the early 1970s, when Svrk slipped out of the Prague theater Malostransk Beseda, during the intermission of an opening night performance, to eat a quick dinner at U Schnell, the pub next door. As soon as he entered the pub, he saw a forest of raised handsimpatient diners who wanted to pay and mistook him, because of his dark suit and bowtie, for one of the pub's waiters. Svrk first offered the script to Ji Menzel, who passed because he thought the material was too thin for a feature-length film. Svrk hoped the actor Petr Nron would play the Vrna character, but Smoljak worried that Nron had become typecast by having played the "infuriated idiot" too many times recently, and cast Josef Abrhm instead. Smoljak revised Svrk's script extensively, dropping, for example, a scene where Vrna escapes from a seafood restaurant because a fishing net on the ceiling drops on his pursuers, and adding a scene in which Vrna flits from one restaurant booth to another, expertly dodging the restaurant's real waiters. Smoljak insisted on filming that scene, as well as a late one, set in Karlovy Vary's Grandhotel Pupp, in a single take, because, he said, "we wanted the viewer to be able to see for himself every move, to see that coordination, whether it clicks or not. In an edit that can't be seen."
Cast
* Josef Abrhm as Dalibor Vrna
* Libue afrnkov as Helenka Vrnov
* Daniela Bakerov as Mrs. Pazkov
* Zdenk Svrk as Pazek
* Elika Balzerov as Saleswoman Vra
* Ji Kodet as Rudy Vyskoil, classmate
* Dagmar Patrasov as Manuela, Rudy's girl
* Karel Augusta as Nephew Ludva
* Zuzana Fierov as Libue Douchov, saleswoman
References
Buy Waiter, Scarper! now from Amazon
<-- Return to movies from 1980