Acting
Simon Templar is The Saint, a handsome, sophisticated, debonair, modern-day Robin Hood who recovers ill-gotten wealth and redistributes it to those in need.
Filmed during the Nazi occupation, this panoramic drama set in a Prague department store follows the divergent destinies of four female coworkers, each of whom seeks happiness in a different way.
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The doomed love of a city girl caught in the vise of poverty is detailed in Vavra’s fluid, romantic work, one of the most elegant creations of the Czech Modernist era... The film lingers over its characters’ habitats and haunts, finding psychological truths in what each owns or desires, and countering every Hollywood-ready scene of gleaming restaurants and dazzling penthouses with realist moments of employment lines and crammed flats. Vavra’s classical camerawork and aura of romantic defeatism give Virginity a force comparable to the master of this genre, Hollywood’s Frank Borzage. (BAM/PFA)
Kind and decent professor Artur Čejka is about to marry his fiancée Helena Frýdlová. On the eve of the wedding, he comes across the unfortunate actress Káťa Holanová on the riverbank, who has been unsuccessfully looking for an engagement for a long time and wants to take her own life out of desperation. Čejka prevents her from committing suicide and helps her. He meets the girl again on the train when he and Helena are going on their honeymoon...
Professor Karas is widely known as enthusiastic propagator of the motto "Morality Above All Else". He guides his students as well as his own family to live a morally decent life. One day he has an unexpected visit. It's his illegitimate daughter Vera, who is proof of his thoughtless youth. Mr. Karas know that she can ruin his image, thus he decides to keep her a secret and asks her to leave. Instead of leaving she takes a position of a governess in his own family without letting him know. Mr. Karas realizes that he must reveal the truth sooner or later, but he doesn't have enough courage to do so. As he postpones it, he is more and more scared to come to his own home.
Wealthy and ill Petr Kornel (Karel Hasler) is not pleased with the carousing lifestyle of his nephew. He stops supporting him financially and demands that he change his name. Out of gratitude Kornel bequeaths a substantial sum of money to his nurse Alice (Adina Mandlová) with the condition that she marries. Petr Suk (Hugo Haas), as the nephew is now named, visits the doctor. In the waiting room his X-ray is mistakenly switched with one of another patient's. On the basis of this he presently learns that he is seriously ill and has only one day of life left to him.
Hospital orderly Rozruch, denied his therapeutic treatment, is mistaken for Dr. Marek at the insurance office and sent to a spa. Councilor Pěna, plotting to wed his mistress after his daughter Heda’s marriage, also arrives. At the spa, impostures collide, identities are exposed, and hidden motives and loyalties come to light.
Eman Vovísek drinks away his unrequited love for Liduška, who married his cousin, the factory owner Danek. Because Eman is aggressive when drunk, he is taken to a mental health facility, where he meets his uncle Hanibal. Hanibal has a breakdown after his wife Matylda broke up with him. Matylda wanted to be free so she could marry her first love, Uncle Jonathan, who is due to arrive from America. Jonathan sends a telegram saying he will stay in Paris. Such a situation does not suit Danek. He assumed that Liduška would be visiting from America and that he himself would go to his mistress in the meantime. He therefore visits Vovísek and persuades him to play the role of Jonathan.
Mr. Ducháček runs the law firm of JUDr. Faukner in a peculiar but completely devoted manner, which manages the financial affairs of the Rispaldic family. The family members treat their lawyer Faukner with condescension, except for their daughter Julia, who secretly loves him. However, no one except Ducháček knows that the squandering family no longer has any money and that JUDr. Faukner is subsidizing it, because he is also secretly in love with Julia.
Young music composer Viktor Honzl in vain looks for work. He is prevented from committing suicide by a technician of the gasworks who shortly beforehand has disconnected his gas due to past due bills. In the disguise of an older, serious, musical scholar Viktor obtains work in a music publishing house.
The main character of the funny story is an ordinary typist Julinka Svobodová, who works for the established business firm Hrubý a syn and lives in a sublet with the seamstress Mrs. Pokorná. Although she is poor and sometimes manages to be late, she is still cheerful and pleasant. However, a small coincidence is enough and everything changes. That is when she takes an elevator ride with the Minister of Trade, Dr. Horák, who coincidentally lives in the same building. Mrs. Pokorná, in good faith, hints to the inquisitive landlady that Julinka is the Minister's girlfriend. From the talkative woman, an innocent rumor spreads like wildfire and, surprisingly, it helps the girl in every way...
Emanuel Pokorný, a bachelor, is to join a rural church school as a professor. Before leaving, however, he finds an infant abandoned in his room. Since he has no time to search for the child's parents, he secretly takes the child to the boarding house. And from that moment on, there is no end to his travails...
One of the few European films of the 30s to criticize the Nazis, even if they couldn't be directly named due to censorship: Gangsters with gray hats stir up trouble in what is obviously the Sudetenland.
The title refers to the office of records in the basement of a large company... sort of the place where a troublesome employee may be dumped in a dead end job. If fact, the story is a simple romantic comedy, with Burian as the kindly old stick-in-the-mud who helps the young man to sort out his romance with the daughter of the company's owner.
A dashing but mysterious man saves a gambler from suicide, crashes the posh party of a prominent industrialist, falls in love with his daughter, and finds himself in a web of intrigue revolving around her blackmailing fiance and a gang of counterfeiters.
A morally questionable lord comes to the aid of a working class man who is to be executed for speaking out about thieving rich scoundrels sticking it to the poor.
A writer of pulp crime novels is drawn into a series of real crimes. This film was one of the first Czech attempts on a genre parody.
