Good Nazi Punching films

[JoseBalow]

11. Closely Watched Trains

One of my favorite films, from Czech New Wave director Jiri Menzel

(4:14)

Closely Watched Trains (Czech: Ostře Sledované Vlaky) is a 1966 Czechoslovakian New Wave coming-of-age comedy film directed by Jiří Menzel and is one of the best-known films of the Czechoslovak New Wave. It was released in the United Kingdom as Closely Observed Trains. It is a story about a young man working at a train station in German-occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II. The film is based on a 1965 novel by Bohumil Hrabal. It was produced by Barrandov Studios and filmed on location in Central Bohemia. Released outside Czechoslovakia during 1967, it received widespread acclaim and won the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 40th Academy Awards in 1968. Nowadays the movie is assessed as one of the finest works of the Czech New Cinema.

Plot
The young Miloš Hrma, who speaks with misplaced pride of his family of misfits and malingerers, is engaged as a newly-trained train dispatcher at a small railway station near the end of the Second World War and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. He admires himself in his new uniform and looks forward, like his prematurely retired train driver father, to avoiding real work. The sometimes pompous stationmaster is an enthusiastic pigeon-breeder who has a kind wife, but is envious of train dispatcher Hubička's success with women. The idyll of the railway station is periodically disturbed by the arrival of Councillor Zedníček, a Nazi collaborator who spouts propaganda at the staff, though he does not influence anyone with it.

-snip-

The Germans and their collaborators are on edge, since their trains and railroad tracks are being attacked by partisans. A glamorous resistance agent, code-named Viktoria Freie, delivers a time bomb to Hubička for use in blowing up a large ammunition train. At Hubička's request, the "experienced" Viktoria also helps Miloš to resolve his sexual problem.

The next day, at the crucial moment when the ammunition train is approaching the station, Hubička is caught up in a farcical disciplinary hearing, overseen by Zedníček, over his rubber-stamping of Zdenička's backside. In Hubička's place, Miloš, liberated from his former passivity by his experience with Viktoria, takes the time bomb and drops it onto the train from a semaphore gantry, which extends transversely above the tracks. A German soldier shoots at him from one of the train cars; Miloš, wounded, falls onto one of the railcars.

Zedníček winds up the disciplinary hearing by dismissing the Czech people as "nothing but laughing hyenas" (a phrase actually employed by the senior Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich). The stationmaster is despondent because the scandal with Hubička and Zdenička seems to have frustrated his ambition of being promoted to inspector. Then a huge series of explosions happens just around a bend in the track as the train is destroyed by the bomb. Hubička, unaware of what has happened to Miloš, laughs to express his joy at this blow to the Nazi occupiers. Máša, who has been waiting to speak with Miloš, picks up his uniform cap, which has wound up at her feet, blown by the huge winds from the blast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closely_Watched_Trains


The full subtitled film is available for free via The Criterion Collection at the Internet Archive, here:
https://archive.org/details/closely-watched-trains