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July 7th, 2008
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Czechs on film

Hollywood loves them but rarely gets it right

July 4th, 2007 issue

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In Casablanca (1942), Paul Henreid plays a dapper leader of the Czech Resistance.
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Character actor John Carradine was cast as Reinhard Heydrich in Hitler's Madman (1943).
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Child actor Ivan Jandl with Montgomery Clift in The Search (1948).
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Kim Novak had Czech roots.
By Jan Drabek
For the Post

In the beginning of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, U.S. soldiers catch the Germans in their trenches on D-Day. One of the Germans desperately calls out not to shoot, that they are not Germans.

In Czech.
In the next moment, they are all felled by a barrage from the Americans’ machine guns. Only when the trenches are already filled with dead bodies does one of the Americans somewhat rhetorically ask what it might have been the Germans were saying.
It’s not only a brilliant use of irony, but another addition to the niche that Czech themes, actors and stories have always occupied in Hollywood films. With the annual Hollywood invasion of Karlovy Vary under way this week, it’s a good time to recap some classic Czech moments in American cinema, which range from forgettable B movies to prominent positions in the Hollywood pantheon.
Among Hollywood’s outstanding directors were and still are Gustav Machatý, Miloš Forman and Ivan Passer. Jan Tříska, Herbert Lom, Karel Roden and Jan Rubeš rank among the more prominent current Czech film actors, while other names such as Francis Lederer, Hugo Haas and Vera Hruba-Ralston lurk in the past. Erich Korngold towers among film composers and Miroslav Ondříček among cameramen, while a plethora of little-known but no less capable Czech stuntmen helped make movies such as Titanic and Gladiator into classics.
And let’s not forget Kim Novak, a major Hollywood star of Czech ancestry who posed serious competition for Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s films Picnic and Vertigo. Unlike the unfortunate Marilyn, however, Novak today lives a quiet life in California with her veterinarian husband.
Czech emigrant Miroslava (her full name was Miroslava Sternová) made it big in Mexico in the 1940s before moving on to B movies in Hollywood. She even appeared on the cover of Life magazine for her role in a 1951 film called The Brave Bulls, but committed suicide four years later, at the age of 30, because of the famed toreador Dominguin.
Fascist fallacies
Hollywood movies with Czech themes were few during the 1930s, but things sure changed after the war started — although the naiveté with which Americans viewed the Third Reich was sometimes more fascinating than the films themselves. In Casablanca, for example, Paul Henreid, who was an escapee from Nazism in real life, plays Viktor Laszlo, “the leader of the Czech underground,” walking about the city in an impeccably tailored white suit. With the help of elegant retorts, he refuses to disclose to German Major Strasser the names of the European Resistance leaders.
During the war, it was a cardinal rule not to know the names of other members of Resistance cells. It was better for everyone’s survival.
In the 1943 film Hangmen Also Die, which deals with the Prague assassination of the Nazi Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, a Charles University professor named Novotný is surprised at home by the Gestapo while holding a seminar. The inept Gestapo man dismisses everyone — including the purported assassin of Heydrich — with no one being asked for identity papers. When Novotný, who is curiously played by Walter Brenna, a later toothless comic mainstay of countless Westerns, is arrested, he immediately demands to know on what charges. The well-mannered Gestapo agent informs him that it’s treason. The only thing Novotný doesn’t demand of the extremely patient Gestapo is to call his lawyer.
Hitler’s Madman, another movie about Heydrich, was made a year later with an even lower level of veracity. Heydrich is portrayed by John Carradine (who later became a memorable Dracula), and a small role of a Czech peasant girl is played by an ingenue named Ava Gardner. The best film about the Heydrich assassination — even though it was made 30 years after the fact — is Martin Gilbert’s Operation Daybreak, in which Anton Diffring is the most sinister Heydrich on record.
One of the best postwar films with a Czech theme was The Search, which arrived in American movie houses right after the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. Metropolitan Opera diva Jarmila Novotna plays a Czech mother searching for her son in postwar Germany. Czech child actor Ivan Jandl portrayed the young boy, and received a miniature Oscar for his effort — long before higher-profile films such as The Shop on Main Street, Closely Watched Trains and Kolya won Academy Awards.
Jandl’s subsequent fate was tragic. Tainted by the award in communist Czechoslovakia, he never got any major roles and died a forgotten man. His last job was as a doorman.
Communism was used for comic effect in Don Siegel’s No Time for Flowers, starring his wife, Viveca Lindfors. The 1952 comedy featured Lindfors as a Czech government worker who falls in love with a secret policeman checking on her loyalty. He thinks Hungarian salami is a more romantic present than flowers, hence the title.
A more serious effort was Elia Kazan’s Man on a Tightrope, made in 1953 with Frederic March, Gloria Graham and Adolphe Menjou. The film follows a Czech circus planning an escape into Bavaria.
Unbearable lightness
Among the less-memorable films with Czech references is The Girl from Jones Beach, a 1949 comedy with Ronald Reagan impersonating a Czech artist. In the middle of Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg, military prosecutor Richard Widmark announces there has been a communist takeover in Prague, which makes it unlikely the United States will try any more Nazis, because Germany will be needed as an ally. It’s a pretty dramatic moment in a powerful film.
In a 1987 thriller called The Living Daylights, James Bond slides across the mountains (which in reality do not exist) between Bratislava and Austria on a cello case. In an earlier and more intelligent Bond flick, From Russia with Love, an interesting Czech chess master is disposed of much too early.
A 1982 stinker with lots of murdering and not enough thinking, The Amateur, features a high-traffic tunnel between communist Czechoslovakia and Austria. Exiled Czech stars Vladimír Valenta (the stationmaster from Closely Watched Trains), Vlasta Vránová and Jan Tříska are all in it, acting as if they wished they weren’t. Anna, a 1987 Hollywood film with Czech supermodel Paulina Porizek, featured Sally Kirkland in the title role sporting an improbable Czech accent. It was essentially a remake of the 1950 classic All About Eve, and earned Kirkland an Oscar nomination. Despite her authentic accent, Porizek’s performance was mediocre.
Outside of Hollywood soundstages, Czech films have been made in some unlikely places. Phil Kaufman’s 1988 version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being was made in France and Switzerland. But some notable efforts have been filmed in the Czech lands, among them The Bridge at Remagen (1968), Amadeus (1984), Kafka (1991), Mission Impossible (1996) and last year’s highly praised The Illusionist.
Currently, there is some talk about a Hollywood film based on the life of political dissident Milada Horáková, who was hanged by the communists in 1950, with names like Meryl Streep being mentioned for the starring role. Otherwise, no big Czech names seem to be waiting in the wings to burst upon the international scene. But it’s been proven more than once that, with a bit of luck, a big name in Hollywood can be acquired overnight.
— Jan Drabek is a Czech-Canadian author and former diplomat. He can be reached at
features@praguepost.com.


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