Jan Dite is short in height, but high in ambition. To put it bluntly, the young provincial waiter wants to become a millionaire. And he knows just how to do it: by hearing everything, seeing everything, and using what he heard and saw.
Armed with this knowledge and an irrepressible wish to please, he soon leaves his first place of employment, a pub, for a luxury brothel and, finally, an elegant Art Nouveau Prague restaurant. But by now it’s the late 1930s, and things are changing: Hitler has taken the Sudetenland and is breaking apart Czechoslovakia. Jan falls in love with Lisa, a Sudeten German proud of her Aryan blood. They marry, and when Lisa returns from the front, she has a fortune in rare stamps that Jews had “left behind”… After her less than heroic death, Jan sells the stamps and becomes … a millionaire. But he only has three years to enjoy his fortune: the new Communist regime puts him behind bars for 15 years, one for each of his millions…
Upon his release from jail, Jan is sent to live in a decrepit border town that was abandoned by the Germans. Here he finally finds the leisure to think about the events that shaped his life – and to reflect on what might have happened if he had played a different role in these events. –Bavaria Film
With his debut feature film Closely Watched Trains (1966), Czechoslovakian filmmaker Jirí Menzel became an important member in Czech New Wave cinema and won an Academy Award. Menzel started out as an assistant director and occasional actor for Vera Chytilova following his graduation from the Prague film school F.A.M.U. In 1965, Menzel directed an episode (“The Death of Mr. Baltazar”) for the feature anthology Pearls of the Deep, a tribute to distinguished Czech author Bohumil Hrabal. Later that year, he contributed an episode in a similar tribute to the writings of Josef Skvorecky, Crime at the Girls School. Following the success of Closely Watched Trains, Menzel directed Capricious Summer (1968) and turned in a great performance as a tightrope walker (Menzel is actually an accomplished balancer and performs regularly on-stage). In 1969, he made Larks on a String, considered by many to be his best work. Unfortunately, its critical stance on Communism led to its being banned from release… read more
This film seems to have been woefully underrated by many. As in his debut, Closely Watched Trains, Menzel whips sex, satire, and lighthearted, old-fashioned comedy into a wonderfully absurd little… read review
