Vladimír Pucholt

Private Standa Urban is one of a group of disappointed soldiers who had been planning to go on leave from a military airfield. He is supposed to be having an important meeting with his great love Jana, who has come to the nearest little town to see him. They have not seen each other for some time and Standa is afraid for the relationship. Unfortunately a second-degree alert has been sounded and the soldiers are not allowed to leave the garrison. The unhappy Standa volunteers for guard duty. Captain Pazourek seems very severe but in fact he is an understanding man. He sends an ambulance with two nurses, Veleba and Rejman, for the girl, and they secretly smuggle her into the sick bay. The attractive blonde becomes the centre of unwanted attention from the soldiers, and before his friends have found Standa, she has become disgusted with the whole adventure.Read More »

This Czech musical deals with adolescent morality and bureaucracy without being heavy handed. Under school supervision, a group of pre-teen boys and girls are busy picking hops. One boy who seeks privacy builds a secret hideaway in an attic. When a schoolgirl finds him in his retreat, innocent puppy-love blossoms, but a jealous classmate tells the teacher about the two friends, and they are suspended from school. The boy and girl accept their punishment and form an even stronger bond. The two leave the school together while their classmates ostracize the jealous informant.Read More »

The flirtatious title of Milos Forman’s breakthrough comedy Loves of a Blonde says a lot about the film without even trying. Everybody in Forman’s bittersweet film thinks about sex constantly but only in terms of hypothetical scenarios that almost never come to pass. The funny thing about these daydreams of coitus is that they’re not strictly sexy. In fact, most of the time characters in Loves of a Blonde are wringing their hands about sex, even the trio of homely soldiers licking their lips at the thought of seducing a table of bored blondes at a local dance. First they send alcohol to the wrong table and are subsequently unsure of how long they should smile at the girls they plan on getting drunk and taking to the woods (they aren’t even sure if the idea of taking girls to the woods for sex is just a euphemism or not). Sex is comedy here because it breeds nothing but the kind of anxiety that the title of Forman’s film teems with.Read More »