Storyline
This futuristic science fiction comedy features an atomic bomb blast that causes women to grow beards and lose the ability to have children. A summit meeting is held at the United Nations, with the proposed solution of building a time machine. The decision is made to travel back in time and murder Einstein, with the hopeful result being that without the noted mathematician’s research there will be no atomic bombs.Read More »
Alois Randa, the manager of the mountain hotel, is overwhelmed with worries: he is expecting a large number of tourists, he cannot cook and his only employee, Miluska, the maid, is packing her bags. She won’t stand Bohous any longer. Bohous is Randa’s giant St. Bernard who refuses to respect Miluska’s privacy. So the maid is gone, but the first guest arrives, hungry as a St. Bernard. The proud owner of the St. Bernard makes a bizarre bet with him – if the guest manage to eat more courses than Bohous, he will be guaranteed a free week’s stay. If he fails, he’ll be hotel’s new maid for a week.Read More »
Trespassing gang of boys encounter a ghost in the ruins of a castle. When they rescue the ghost who is caught in a trapset, they become allies in a fight to prevent ruins from being turned into mushroom farm by the city authorities.Read More »
The May 1961 premiere of The Song of the Gray Dove (Piesen o sivom holubovi, 1960) directed by Stanislav Barabas (1924-1994) marked the start of filmmakers’ use of ideologically unassailable themes (in this case, the Slovak National Uprising) to tell stories that were true-to-life and yet were filmed creatively. The Song of the Gray Dove rejected the narrative topics loved by Palo Bielik, who was the most creative member of the founding generation of filmmakers. By using boys as his heroes, Barabas was able to concentrate more on children’s fears, games, and happiness, which had not vanished even during the war years, rather than on reeducating viewers. Critics took notice of the film (it won the 1961 Czechoslovak Film Critics’ Award together with the Czech film People Live Here Too [Vsude zijí lidé; dir. Jirí Hanibal and Stepán Skalsky, 1960) because of its intimate storytelling—six stories loosely connected by child-heroes—and its premise that children’s distorted reality can be more truthful than a so-called objective reconstruction of history.Read More »
Quote:
This is unimaginable today, but on Saturday 16 January 1982, BBC2 showed an ultra-obscure subtitled Czech film in an early enough slot (9.35pm) to garner a decent-sized audience – “decent-sized” equating to “many times larger than BBC4’s wildest dreams”, given that Britain had only three television channels at the time (for the record, it was up against Match of the Day on BBC1, and the small-screen premiere of Capricorn One on ITV, a somewhat sci-fi heavy night). Read More »
A factory producing agricultural machines is about to be thoroughly modernized. If he wants to keep his job, master craftsman Kroupa (Jirí Sovák) is going to have to improve his qualifications through further training and completing his school-leaving exams. Kroupa is persuaded to go back to school by his subordinates who fear that the unbearable Hujer (Václav Lohniský), who has already signed on for schooling, may get promoted and take Kroupa’s place. The students at the evening classes of the technical college are all middle-aged people. Even so, there are go-getters, shirkers and slobs among them just like in any other school.Read More »
Synopsis:
The invincible agent Cyril Juan Borguette alias W4C (Jan Kacer) 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 (Kveta Fialová). 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 (Jirí Sovák) 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.Read More »