Days of Betrayal

Otakar Vávra, 1972

Film at Filmový přehled

Summary

Narrative historical pictures play an important role in the extensive filmography of director Otakar Vávra. In this two-part reconstruction of the events of 1938, the doyen of Czech directing pursued modern Czechoslovak history. Together with the film’s other makers, Vávra indeed grounded himself with the genre of historical reconstruction and a care for authenticity, but Days of Betrayal offers a choice of facts beholden to the ideological concept as specified by the socialist state. Thus the film highlights communist Klement Gottwald as a positive figure, and the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia as having a positive role, in the tragic historical events leading up to the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler’s Germany. The story’s protagonists are not only greats of the political scene at the time, they are also members of a fictional Prague working-class family whose fortunes are also captured in Vávra’s next movies Sokolovo (1974) and Osvobození Prahy (The Liberation of Prague, 1976).
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Film data

About a film

Production year 1972
Countries Czechoslovakia
Categories film
Genres historical
Form feature
Duration 227 min
Director Otakar Vávra
Cast Jiří Pleskot, Bohuš Pastorek, Gunnar Möller, Jaroslav Radimecký, Martin Gregor
Director of photography Jaromír Šofr
Screenplay Miloslav Fábera, Otakar Vávra
Editor Antonín Zelenka
Production designer Karel Lier
Artist Ester Krumbachová
Music Zdeněk Liška
Sound designer Adolf Böhm