"Be Prepared!" is quite the hour-long Boy Scouts commercial of a test of my dedication to seeing a lot of old silent films and to especially include films from countries (Czechoslovakia in this case) underrepresented in my viewing history. The first half of this is incredibly dull in its lack of drama and in its promotion of scouting. Boys with perfect families in a perfectly lovely city get perfect marks in school and ask to join a scouting troop as their reward. They, then, go camping and have a perfectly good time for a while. It's all so perfectly boring no matter how much the wordy title cards gush. When we finally get some conflict, it's pretty awful. Only the scenic footage of Prague and the countryside, especially the travelogue-like scenes at the film's bookends, is worth rating this a star. Besides the phantom-ride POV shots on a train, the ones on a boat and raft may be especially valuable for documentary evidence given that the St. John's Rapids they're recorded on, as the festival's notes point out, have since been flooded for a dam.
It's a relief when some drama finally enters the picture, but unfortunately it's all in the promotion of discrimination and gender norms. The scouts scare off some wannabe scouts (a "savage society," as the title cards put it) because they drink, smoke and, worst of all, include a female in their camping. Granted, they clearly don't know how to cook a rabbit, as they throw a corpse, fur an' all, straight into a lukewarm pot above their barely flickering campfire. But, not everyone can steal a gardener's vegetables while otherwise assisting in the mocking of that poor man, which is exactly what the scouts here incredulously do. And, they do so with the assistance of a rich young woman staying at her daddy's nearby castle. She also provides what is the main suspenseful event when, as soon as she's left on her own, she promptly falls off her horse--knocking herself unconscious.
Thus, scouts to the rescue. Now, I'm sure one learns some interesting or useful things in scouting, but, boy, is this film a bad advertisement for that. Even before supposedly rescuing the damsel-in-distress, we mostly just see them splashing in water and dancing around a campfire, as well as bullying that "savage society" that they deem doesn't belong in the woods. To rescue the unconscious woman, they perform a bit of flag signaling, which is entirely useless since they could've yelled to or ran up to each other in the time it takes to perform that arcane skill. If no binoculars are being used and you're not in the midst of a battlefield, it's unnecessary and looks ridiculous. Even worse, once signaled, the scouts gather every member of their troop together, including waiting for those splashing in the water to get dressed. No rush, boys, it's just a medical emergency. At least, I guess, it answers the question of how many scouts does it take to operate a stretcher and dab water on an unconscious woman's forehead--turns out, it takes all of them. On the top of that, one of the scouts lassos the stationary horse that the woman fell off of, because... why not. Anyways, once they retrieve the doctor, he treats the woman with more water dabbing of the forehead. I'm going to imagine the woman died a few weeks later from a scull fracture or something as compounded by incompetent and untimely medical treatment.
Aside from the aforementioned scenery, "Be Prepared!" isn't particularly interesting historically, either, as scouting doesn't seem to have changed much across a century or across countries. It's the same paramilitary mix of bigotry and nationalism while camping that it's usually been.
(Note: "Be Prepared!" is the second film available to stream for the time being as part of "A Season of Classic Films" presented by the Czech National Film Archive. The restoration is a nicely tinted and toned print. The score presented is easily better than the one they provided with the festival's prior film, "White Paradise" (Bílý ráj) (1924), as at least it sounds like music, but it's still an annoyingly modern one that's unrelated to the images.)
