Ján Kadár

Czech director Ján Kadár (1918–1979) became the first filmmaker from Czechoslovakia to win an Academy Award for best foreign film for The Shop on Main Street. The 1965 cinema classic is a bittersweet tale of an elderly Jewish shopkeeper in a small Slovakian town during World War II, and the troubles that befall her. Kadár's film was the first in a brief but significant burst of projects from the Eastern Bloc country during the 1960s in what came to be known as the Czech New Wave.

Interned During the War

Kadár was of Jewish extraction himself, but claimed he rarely encountered anti–Semitism during his lifetime. He was born on April 1, 1918, in the same year that Czechoslovakia achieved independence in the aftermath of World War I's end and the dissolution of the Austro–Hungarian empire. As a young man, he studied law in the Slovak capital of Bratislava, but abandoned it to pursue photography by 1938. The Munich Agreement that same year, between Nazi Germany and other western European nations, gave tacit approval for Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia. Slovakia became an independent fascist state, under close German supervision, for the duration of World War II.

Czechoslovakia's Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps, and at one point Kadár ran afoul of authorities and spent time in a labor camp himself in the early 1940s. After the war's end, Czechoslovakia became a Communist Party–dominated socialist republic, closely allied with the Soviet Union. Kadár moved into the re–emerging film industry, and became a producer and director at the Bratislava Studio of Short Films. His first credit was the 1945 documentary short, Life Is Rising from the Ruins, about the rebuilding of Slovakia in the months immediately following the end of the war.

Periodically Ran Afoul of Authorities

In 1946 Kadár joined the highly regarded Barrandov Studios in Prague, sometimes called the "Hollywood of the East." There he was a scriptwriter and assistant director, and directed his first feature film, Katka (Cathy), in 1950. Shot in Slovakia, the film centers around a young woman from a poor village who becomes a factory worker. Its failure to meet a certain politically correct ideology as dictated by the state–controlled film industry landed Kadár in trouble, and he was briefly expelled from the state filmmakers' union.

At Barrandov Kadár had met Elmar Klos, and the two began a collaboration in 1952 that would endure for much of their career inside Czechoslovakia. The alliance with Klos, who was also part of group that drew up plans for the nationalization of the Czech film industry, certainly helped him avoid some—though not all—future trouble. Their first film together was 1952's Únos (Kidnapped), about a group of Czechoslovakians desperate to flee to the West. They hijack a plane, but find themselves the political pawns of an ardent group of anti–Communists. Hudba z Marsu (Music from Mars), released in 1954, was Kadár and Klos's next project together, but the musical comedy poked fun at bureaucrats and once again aroused the ire of government officials.

Started Gritty Czech Realism

With Dum na konečné (House at the Terminus), Kadár and Klos managed to make a film that satisfied political ideologies. The plot centers on Olina, a young woman who unexpectedly finds herself pregnant. Her boyfriend, Karel, is uninterested in marriage or becoming a parent, and tries to urge her to terminate the pregnancy. In the end, she spurns him and decides to have the child on her own. "By avoiding explicitly 'public' problems and issues and concentrating instead on the private sphere, the film managed to avoid censure for drawing what is surely a rather depressing picture of Czech society," noted an essay on Kadár's works that appeared in the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers.

For their next work, Kadár and Klos made a modern fairy tale, but it also touched upon a housing shortage in the country and other difficulties, and for this they earned a two–year suspension from filmmaking. Tri prání (Three Wishes), made in 1958 but not shown in Czechoslovakia until 1963, is the familiar story of a man who has been granted three wishes. He prospers, but his closest friend loses his job for voicing criticisms of the regime; the wish–granter returns and offers to restore the friend's career if the hero gives up what he has gained via the three previous favors. After their suspension was finished, Kadár and Klos returned with Smrt sí říká Engelchen (Death Is Called Engelchen), released in 1963, which took the top prize at the Moscow Film Festival. In 1964, they made Obzalovany (The Accused), a story about embezzlement at a hydroelectric power plant.

In 1965, signs of a new cultural and political movement in Czechoslovakia were emerging. Certain restrictions had loosened, and the arts began to flourish. Cinema, in particular, became the new proving ground for less–than–ideal portrayals of life behind the Iron Curtain. Bohumil Hrabal's 1965 film Pearls of the Deep ushered in what became known as the Czech New Wave, which would encompass some 200 films in all before its abrupt end in 1968. Taking its name from the French nouvelle vague cinema classics of the 1950s by Jean–Luc Godard, these films were groundbreaking depictions of life in the Eastern Bloc that featured socially relevant topics filmed with a lyrical artistry.

The Shop on Main Street

Kadár's Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street) was released in 1965 and became one of the first products of the Czech New Wave to win international acclaim. Kadár borrowed the story from a novel by Ladislav Grosman called The Trap, and worked with Klos to adapt the novel for the screenplay. The story is set in a small town in northeastern Slovakia during World War II. Mrs. Lautmann is an elderly Jewish widow and the proprietor of a button and sewing–notions store. When a law goes into effect that forbids Jews from owning businesses, a bumbling carpenter named Tono (Josef Kroner) is assigned to take it over as its new "Aryan controller." Reviewing Kadár's masterpiece in the New York Times in 1966, film critic Bosley Crowther asserted "it is one of the very few films from central Europe made since World War II that has dared to treat frankly and unrelentingly . . . the black crime of Jewish persecution in which so many millions of people in Europe were morally involved."

Tono's greedy wife is pleased, believing that his new post will boost the household income, but Tono learns Mrs. Lautmann's shop makes little money and barely stocks any goods anyway. Tono soon develops a fondness for the kindly widow, who is both hard of hearing and blissfully unaware of current events. She believes Tono has come to work as her assistant, and a contingent of Jews in the community offer him money to maintain the ruse. When deportations of Jews to the Nazi concentration camps begin, Mrs. Lautmann's name is not on the official list. Tono fears that he will be jailed for protecting a Jew, and tries to convince her to go anyway when loudspeakers warn the townspeople against hiding the deportees. When Mrs. Lautmann balks, an agitated and drunken Tono locks her in a closet, and later finds her dead. Horrified, he hangs himself. "The fact that the little carpenter, like Judas Iscariot, hangs himself is a clear and devastating symbolization," noted Crowther in the New York Times, "of the shame of betraying the Christian faith."

Czech Cinema Briefly Flourished

The Shop on Main Street won the 1965 Academy Award for best foreign film in early 1966, and was an international box–office hit despite its tough subject matter. "An extremely effective picture of everyday fascism in an ordinary small community, the film may revolve around a grim and tragic theme but it is actually played largely as a gentle comedy," the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers essay noted some years later. "Kadár once claimed that his favourite directors were Chaplin, Truffaut, and Fellini, and their presences can all be felt here."

Thanks in part to Kadár's success, the Czech New Wave flourished over the next few years. Several other groundbreaking films came out of the country, including Closely Watched Trains, which won an Academy Award for best foreign film in 1968, and Milos Forman's The Fireman's Ball, an Oscar nominee in the category in 1969. But the increasingly liberal climate in Czechoslovakia, even within the Communist Party itself, aroused the wrath of Moscow, and in August of 1968 Soviet tanks rolled across the borders. The brief era known as that year's "Prague Spring" abruptly ended, as did the groundbreaking works from the country's films studios.

Kadár left Czechoslovakia, setting first in Vienna and later in Los Angeles. At the time of the Soviet invasion, he and Klos were working on a Czech–American production called Adrift. They were later able to return and finish the bleak, haunting tale of a young woman who tries to commit suicide by jumping in the Danube River and the man who saves her—or believes he has saved her. A critic for the Harvard Crimson, Alan Heppel, found it a trenchant parable. "Kadár resolves none of the dilemmas that his movie raises; he merely suggests the universality and complexity of its problems. Uncertainty is at the film's center. Yanos questions himself so completely that he becomes unsure of the existence of the girl. In an age of doubt the threat of losing one's moorings is implicit in every variation of routine. Adrift is a magnificently crafted and disturbing reminder of every man's tenuous hold on the secure and the controllable."

Worked in Hollywood

Lured by Hollywood, Kadár directed his first American feature film, The Angel Levine, based on a Bernard Malamud story. The 1970 release starred Zero Mostel as a devout Jew who cannot afford medicine for his ailing wife. Ida Kaminská, the veteran stage actress from Warsaw who had played Mrs. Lautmann in The Shop on Main Street, was cast as his wife. An angel appears in their kitchen, but in a twist, he is black, played by Harry Belafonte.

Kadár spent the rest of the decade making mostly television films. He directed Lies My Father Told Me for Canadian television in 1975, about a Jewish boy growing up in Montreal in the 1920s, The Blue Hotel in 1977, and The Other Side of Hell, a supernatural thriller. His last project was Freedom Road, a 1979 NBC mini–series that starred boxing great Muhammad Ali as a former slave who becomes a U.S. senator in the Reconstruction–era American South.

Kadár died on June 1, 1979, in Los Angeles. The Shop on Main Street remains a cinema classic. An essay he wrote in 1966 that appeared in the New York Herald Tribune that year as well as on the 2001 DVD release of his Oscar–winner was titled "Not the Six Million but the One." In it, he discussed the casting of Kaminská and Josef Kroner in the lead roles. "We were fortunate," he noted. "Their dramatic unity has swept me off my feet. And I am sure that audiences will find it difficult to forget the white–haired, hard–of–hearing, and bewildered old lady with the innocent face. She is the most powerful reminder I know of fascism and its victims."

Books

Hames, Peter, The Czechoslovak New Wave, University of California Press, 1985.

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 2: Directors, fourth edition, St. James Press, 2000.

Periodicals

Harvard Crimson, February 23, 1972.

New York Herald Tribune, January 23, 1966.

New York Times, January 30, 1966.

Variety, October 22, 2001.