Must-Watch List in the Vein of La cinquième empreinte: Cult Guide

Dir: Karl Anton

Monsieur Albert is a very elegant and much appreciated butler. One day he falls in love with a client, Sylvia Robertson, and follows her to a winter sports resort. Sylvia does not recognize him and imagines that he is related to a king who goes incognito.

Dir: Karl Anton

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of Die Galgentonitonischka perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

A woman returns from the countryside to her home in Prague and works as a prostitute. When she accepts the plight of a convicted murderer to spend one night with a woman before his death, she garners the criticisms of everyone around her.

Dir: Karl Anton

A fascinating piece of cinema that shares thematic elements.

Dir: Karl Anton

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of Tu ten kámen perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

A fascinating piece of cinema that shares thematic elements.

Dir: Karl Anton

A lyrical tale of the pure, vernal romance between a diffident, somewhat naive girl from a rural backwater and a fairly dissolute, but kind-hearted law student from Prague.

Dir: Karl Anton

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of Le chasseur de chez Maxim's perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

Lighthouse keeper Uwe Bull lives with his wife Hanne and the assistant Jens in a secluded, small world. When the only survivor from a shipwreck, young Margot from Reeperbahn, is washed up on the island, Uwe's feelings arouses.

Dir: Karl Anton

Prince Philippe of Bracowa must join his fiancée by train. The young and pretty Gisèle is on the same train, for her too to join her fiancé.

Dir: Karl Anton

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of Pohádka máje perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

A fascinating piece of cinema that shares thematic elements.

Dir: Karl Anton

This Czech sophisticated romantic comedy, filmed by director Anton also in a parallel French version ("Une petite femme dans le train"), casts beautiful Czech star Baarova in the role that Meg Lemonnier played in the Gallic version. Both versions seem to owe something to the sophisticated "continental" comedies of Lubitsch and, later, Korda, although Anton was not exactly in their league. It may be coincidence that the original Czech title of this film ("Jsem devce...") can be translated as "I'm a Girl with a Devil in the Flesh." Both Raymond Radiguet's French novel "Le diable au corps" and Garbo's famous MGM film, "Flesh and the Devil" (based on Radiguet's book), would have been well known in Czechoslovakia as well as France, before "Jsem devce..." was filmed. But the Radiguet & Garbo creations were very serious, while the Anton-Lemonnier-Baarova films were light and amusing. Pehaps no connection. (A Czech language web-site today displays a nice poster from the 1933 Czech film: "http://www.csfd.cz/film.php?186".) Lida Baarova (who plays the naughty wife in the Czech film) in her later career experienced less amusing and more serious ups and downs, particularly as a consequence of her brief stardom in Nazi Germany in the last half of the 1930s and in Fascist Italy in the early 1940s. After WW2 Baarova was jailed nearly 2 years in her native Czechoslovakia, and may have come close to the death penalty, accused of "collaborating" with the Fascist film industries.

Dir: Karl Anton

Sophisticated romantic comedy of suspicious husbands, straying wives, handsome lovers, with various misunderstandings thrown in for good measure. (Including a gender-reversal of the old Pirandello plot twist from "The Late Mathias Pascal" of the protagonist changing identities after supposedly perishing in a train wreck.)