...and the Fifth Horseman Is Fear

I saw this movie when I was a teenager and it's stayed with me ever since. Why it has never been digitalized for VHS and/or DVD is a mystery to me. This movie captures the true essence of horrible Nazi atrocities without today's special effects or computer graphics and is able to communicate it's primal message to the viewer with the best acting, directing and film noir that I've ever seen. Strangely, the film (titled "The Fith Horseman is Fear" for American audiences) leaves you with a sense of hope and is somewhat uplifting - I strongly recommend it and hope that this message helps attract enough attention for someone to format it for home viewing.

I spent one winter systematically going through each & every film in the London Czech Centre's Video library, & of all the films, I returned to this one time & again. It's a fantastic & bizarre film, where the state of despair that existed under communism is encoded in a strange blending of the past , the present & film

noir.

There is the feeling that an ad-hoc attempt to get past the censors unwittingly produces an utterly Czechoslovakian perspective.To those familiar with Eastern Europe pre 1989, the sense of time having become stuck & disorientated & playing games with your perception is part of

the magic of this film.

My fondness for this film is rooted in a nostalgia or need to remember

communist Europe. I first visited Prague in the mid 1980's & i was so struck that the Prague of this film replicated almost identically the Prague i found & came to know 20 years later, in the last years of Communism. My nights at the Cafe

Slavia were exactly as the Jazz club scenes depicted in the film, with the same dramas & the same characters. Also the sense of mistrust , betrayal & of being watched & listened to & the perverse relation to Psychiatry. I thought this connection was very profound, & it made me think this film was, in some way, important . Both the film & my experiences in Prague sat either side of the Brief thaw of the late sixties. They bypassed that optimistic period & looked directly at each other; the one reflecting a National trauma of the war & Communist conversion & the other reflecting the trauma of 2 decades of

stagnation. Often when people think of Czech New Wave, they think in terms of 60's youth & Prague spring. But this film brought home to me how brief that

period really was & it's focus is the context from which that period rose &

returned to; a shockingly, relentless, hyper-unreal, oppressive isolation which was the former state of Czechoslovakia. Go see, fantastic -

1968) ...And The Fifth Horseman Is Fear/ ...a pátý jezdec je Strach (In Czechoslovakia with English subtitles) WAR/ DRAMA

Almost plot less where the film states the situation without telling a story, but it is still effective once the viewer hangs onto it about actual oppression and dictatorship felt by an once renowned ex-Jewish doctor, Dr. Braun(Miroslav Machácek) while living in the Nazi invaded town of Czechoslovakia. He eventually regains his identity once he was asked to perform surgery to save a stranger injured by a gun shot wound! Possesses the same emotions as "The Pawnbroker" starring Rod Steiger! If watched obliviously without reading the synopsis would make the first half hour hard to get into since it's rather plot less, and was able to tolerate it once I listened to the introduction told by Robert Osbourne of "Turner Classic Movies". Interesting note that the film had to be approved by gov't censors who at the time it was made would not approve the film at all, had they known it was about the Czech authorities working alongside with the Nazis!

It even more painful to realize that there are maybe thousands of those unknown gems from the other side of the former Iron Curtain; of course not large audiences movies, maybe too intellectual but that's precisely why they are so interesting. This kind of topic could have been told in France, or any other western country. I could think about French MR KLEIN, the closest scheme to this one. Those Polish or Czech films, shot in black and white, were all gloomy, depressing, obscure, but so well filmed, with such camera work skills. I highly recommend it to any WW2 related gem diggers.

This is the most overlooked film I have seen and I have seen thousands. It doesn't appear in Maltin's book of 17,000 reviews. It is basically a day in the life of a Jewish doctor who is exempted from removal by Nazis because they can use his services. He risks his life helping the underground. In one gut wrenching scene he observes young women in a large shower room. For a moment you wonder if gas will come from the showerheads but it's water and there is a lovely lyrical voyeuristic few seconds before the camera cuts abruptly to the women being distributed to disrobing waiting SS officers. This is not an easy film to watch. It challenges the viewer's imagination with the "What would I do?" question throughout.