13th Police Station

Filming began during the occupation in the spring of 1945 at the Nationalfilm with Lida Baar as Frón. The film was originally directed by J. A. Holman (Ladislav Brom was also considered). After director Holman fled to Slovakia, Martin Frič took over the work. During the revolution, work on the film was interrupted, after the liberation Lída Baarová was recast by Dana Medřická and Martin Frič resumed shooting in August 1945.

"A Czech film detective story set in the pre-war Prague periphery. A pretty good Czech film, whose strengths are suspense, dramatic pace, good level of acting and all-round technical perfection. The downsides of the film - the implausibility of some of the plots, the inappropriate casting of some roles - must be attributed to both the subject matter and the difficulties the film had to overcome during the transition from the occupation to the new conditions." - (Filmová kartotéka 1946, no. 1)

"Marvan's Inspector Čadek in the 13th district hinted at what Czech detectives will be like in the years to come. He is not the type of infallible investigator, but a conscientious police officer, laboriously collecting individual pieces of evidence. Similarly, detective fiction as such will lose its former romantic flavour after the Second World War. After the war experience, audiences would probably not believe that a single man could use his intellect to restore order and re-establish former values. No other films of this kind were made in this country, as the Czechoslovak detective genre essentially ceased to exist in 1948. The film became a tool of ideological warfare and the cinemas were flooded with addictive building and espionage dramas." - Martin Šrajer

+ short film
Frank mezi námi / Frank Among Us
directed by Miroslav Hubacek - František Sádek

Czechoslovakia 1946 / 13 min. / HD

An edited documentary about the political rise and fall of K. H. Frank's rise and fall in March 1946 as a prequel to the detective film 13th Revír. The surviving version of the documentary is later and includes Frank's end on the scaffold in May 1946.