Wzorowy kinematograf Haška Jaroslava

"...and slept the sound sleep of a man whose legs are broken." Brilliantly imaginative stories by Hašek, of which I liked the one in which Jaroslav Marvan and his future son-in-law Jiří Sovák, together with the rest of the family and neighbors, chased a hamster off the couch with ferrets, guinea pigs and hedgehogs. Of course, the other stories also had a lot going for them, and the connecting material and, of course, Jan Werich's absolutely precise commentary were also very nice. (23.10.2013)

"Don't worry, these are the smelliest guinea pigs in Austria-Hungary!" It's wrong from the start, because the contained Hašek stories in it don't have good cinematic potential, so they often repeat the same situations and each one takes an unnecessarily long time on top of that. You're safely set up for this by the utterly desperate first story, which is all about several people not being able to open the door to the toilet without making any kind of funny point. That the film itself struggles with the material is evident just by the fact that it uses virtually every narrative crutch, and by that I mean that there is, among other things, both overvoice and off-screen text describing the plot. If you remember anything from the film, it's the reminiscence of Caddyshack, Ludmila Píchová's manic performance, and a fairly credible attempt to formally conform to pre-war framing and narrative style. It's only overrated here because of Werich, which is a general problem in the Czech Republic, because prickly folk wisecracks are a local disease of civilization. (11.04.2022)