Production
Two kind but foolish sisters live together in their villa in a small town in South Bohemia. Fany (Natasa Gollová) has never married and Andelka (Eva Svobodová) is a widow. In the morning, the two sisters go into town. They need to buy fuel oil, put money in the bank and give plums to the teller. In the meantime an smallish orange Skoda MB car parks at their house, with Hermínka (Iva Janzurová), the old ladies' niece, and her fiancé Michal (Jirí Hrzán) in it. Michal has forgotten to bring flowers and has to go into town to fetch them. At the bank, Fany wants to deposit money but the minute the teller opens the safe, a thief arrives. He knocks the teller and Fany unconscious and runs away with the money. When Fany comes to her senses again, she sees Michal and accuses him of being the thief.
Cast out by his father, young Ondrej joins the Order of the Teutonic Knights, where he is raised by strict monk Armin. After years of hardship, Ondrej escapes from the Order when he is wrongly punished, and sets out for his former home. Arriving to discover his father to be dead, Ondrej now not only assumes control of his father's properties, but seeks to marry his former stepmother.
The plot begins in the Soviet Union showing first efforts to establish the Czechoslovak legion in 1942. The film also shows the assassination of Heydrich and the subsequent annihilation of Lidice. The main topis of the film is battles with German troops for Sokolovo.
A British citizen by the name of George Reiner (Jirí Sovák) arrives at Prague airport. He was once a Czech safe-breaker, and has now returned home after thirty years to steal twenty-dollar gold coins still kept in the safe at a private villa in Pilsen whose owner fled to the West.
The second part of the revolutionary Hussite trilogy takes place in the years 1419-1420.
The 19-year-old volleyball player has been bedridden for a long time due to a spinal injury. The self-confident and energetic girl has time to recap her life and short sporting career so far...
Three loosely-connected tales that represent different aspects of love: temptation, dreams, and adventure.
It is the summer of 1968 and also in South Moravian Pálavice appear political clashes. The so far peacefully farming Unified farmers' cooperative starts splitting. Some of the farmers have found the cooperative called Vidrupa and want to deal with wine in private trade. Michal Janák, chairman of the farmers' cooperative is a deliberate man and refuses the latent return to the capitalism. As an excellent farmer he continues preparing planting out new vineyards. His adversaries do not agree - the returns will come many years later. Jozka Hrdlicka, an émigré, notices on the Austrian TV the interview with the representatives of Vidrupa and decides to visit his native village. The new suit and the hired car transform the bankrupt and criminal to the successful businessman with wine.
A small town is one day visited by a priest who is there on a secret mission. He is a member of the Inquisition sent to investigate the activities of a local miller. The miller and his son are the descendants of an old family whose ancestral home burned down a century ago, but was rebuilt from scratch. The miller inherited much of his knowledge about the land, water, and a building's stability from generations of family experience. His reputation for finding water and predicting when a structure might collapse have come to the attention of the Inquisition -surely he must be in league with the Devil.
A verger, who likes to dress as a priest, is invited, by one of the villagers, to be the pastor at a vacant church. The atheist teacher resents the pastor, and tries to embarrass him in various ways, including being caught with the local girl, Majka.
The first part of the "Hussite Revolutionary Trilogy", completed with Jan Žižka (1955) and Proti všem (Against All Odds, 1957). The film captures the period from May 1412 to the summer of 1415, a turbulent time in the Czech Kingdom, during which there were protests in Prague against the sale of "omnipotent indulgences" whose sale throughout the kingdom was announced by Pope John XXIII. The ideological leader of this movement is the preacher Master Jan Hus, whose words, calling for the elimination of church abuses, are listened to in the Bethlehem Chapel by thousands of ordinary Praguers, Czech lords and Queen Sophie, wife of the Czech King Wenceslas IV.
At long last, King Dalimil and Queen Eliška have produced an heir, Princess Růženka. Consumed with envy, Eliška’s sister Melánie casts a curse: On the day Růženka turns seventeen, she will prick her finger and fall into a deep sleep together with the entire kingdom.
Olga Valentová, whose father was a communist resistance fighter and died during the occupation, works in the export department of Tatrovka. The young woman recapitulates her life and returns to her father's ideals.
The invincible agent Cyril Juan Borguette alias W4C has been assigned a mission to go to a hotel in Prague, get hold of a saltcellar with a plan for the military exploitation of Venus hidden in it, and hand it over to the beautiful agent Alice. He will have to compete for the saltcellar with other agents working for the world's various greater and smaller powers. The head of the Prague counter-intelligence unit gets news of agent W4C's mission. Deficient in personnel, he nominates accountant Foustka as agent 13B. Mr Foustka takes his dog Pajda with him and the two head for the airport. Pajda helps him track down agent W4C in a classy hotel that becomes the battleground for the interests and plans of the secret agents from different countries, each trying to get hold of the precious saltcellar.
The heroes of this absurd comedy, full of confusion and humor are Dzharda Zemanek and Frantisek Liska.
During the Nazi occupation of a Czech city civilians are being rounded up on the slightest of pretexts and shot. One day three high school boys who crack jokes about a recently deceased "hero of the Reich" are pulled out of school by the Gestapo.
The suffocating conditions in a bourgeois family were depicted in several films in the second half of the 1950s - this one is one of the lesser known, although it achieves great emotional impact, free from the first ideological pressures. The title character, the owner of the tenement house Mrs. Dulská, controls her relatives and tenants with a firm and despotic hand. To achieve her goals, she masterfully combines tears, blackmail and insidious intrigues, or does not hesitate to abuse the trusting and handsome maid Hanka when she wants her son not to fool around. Everything suddenly turns around when Hank gets pregnant... But the appearance of a good reputation is more important to her than anything.
Mr. Novak tells a lie to his neighbor Mrs. Bartackova that her husband is unfaithful to her and that is how it all started.
After the battle of Sudoměř the Hussite teaching spreads through the whole country and people start leaving their homes to help build the fortification of Tábor. Prague citizens request help against the army of Zikmund. The Hussite army with Jan Žižka in the lead make their way towards Prague. They fortify themselves on the mountain Vítkov and engage in a bloody battle with Zikmund’s huge army.
This film, chronicling the last days of Czech resistance fighter Maruska Kuderikova (played by Magda Vasaryova), is based on her diaries. Though she was tortured and eventually executed by the Nazis, her diaries indicate that she was optimistic for the humanity of her captors and did not by any means hate them. Told with simple dignity, this film makes clear why Maruska became a national hero.
