CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS (OSTRE SLEDOVANE VLAKY) (1966) B/W 89m dir: Jiri Menzel

w/Václav Neckár, Jitka Bendová, Josef Somr, Vladimír Valenta, Vlastimil Brodsky´, Jiri Menzel, Libuse Havelková, Alois Vachek, Jitka Zelenohorská, Ferdinand Kruta, Nada Urbánková, Kveta Fialová, Pavla Marsálková, Milada Jezková, Zuzana Minichova Václav Fiser

From The Movie Guide: "The first feature from the 28-year-old Czech filmmaker Menzel is a comic, humanistic look at a teenage railway trainee, Milos (Neckár), who is sent off to a desolate station in Bohemia during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. Hidden away from much of the rest of the world, Milos and the very ordinary characters who pass through the station try to live as if they were not caught in the midst of WWII. Milos learns his trade with relative ease, working under the experienced guidance of dispatcher Hubicka (Somr). A bored womanizer, Hubicka also becomes the uneasy boy's mentor in the ways of the world, which are all too quickly being thrust upon him. During the course of the film, Milos turns freedom fighter and experiences a variety of incidents, including sexual initiation, a botched suicide, and an act of heroism.

"Possibly the best known and the most commercially successful film of the Czech New Wave of the 1960s during the all-too-brief Prague Spring, CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS went on to win an Oscar for Best Foreign [Language] Film. Comic, tragic, romantic, and realistic, it is a film of great warmth and honesty, photographed in wonderfully stark black and white and cast with an exceptional group of actors."