Advent

The five films that Vladimír Vlček made independently are all in color, which is a significant fact for Czech production of the 1950s. He gained experience as an assistant on colorful imperial blockbusters, which became the best school for him. He finally crowned his career with his first widescreen home movie and then there were no more milestones left for him to achieve. Advent, based on the book by Jarmila Glazarová, is one of the best ten color films of 1956, and the bar was set quite high given the four children's films and fairy tales that are now classics, as well as the first part of The Good Soldier Schweik. Advent builds on the peasant dramas that enjoyed their greatest success in the mid-1930s with the onset of Rovenský's film Maryša. Glazarová in fact wrote her works from 1936 to 1940. The book "Advent" from 1939 is a ballad-prose set over the course of one night. The characters speak to each other in the North Moravian dialect and the whole expresses the author's affection for the Wallachians. Several of the main roles are played very suggestively by Nina Jiránková, who has a specific fragile grace and a beautiful soft diction, as well as Gustav Hilmar as her older, stubborn landlord and Marie Vášová as the most monstrous figure in Czech cinema ever - the whore Rozina. Zdeňka Baldová and Jarmila Kurandová created the counterpoints of two older women, one a herbalist and the other a grandmother. The child actor Vojtěch Rosenberg's performance falls into the standard of the time, and the then-young Otto Lackovič does not surprise us with his lyrical hero. It is no wonder that the next adaptation (The Wolf Trap) was made the following year. Today, we can only regret that the creators did not go on to adapt her other works. (29.09.2009)