Last Ball at the Pool

Karel Štorkán adapted his novel into a screenplay for this war drama, directed in 1974 by Ivo Novák. The story follows the fate of students in the WWII year of 1944 who decide to ignore a ban on organising the annual ball of the teaching institute they attend in a small town. The arranged event at the local swimming pool ends up putting the life of the young protagonists in danger. Local resistance fighters are battling a merciless SS troop unit. Student Lenka does not manage to attend the ball when she is compelled to hide a wounded partisan at her home… The motion picture’s dramatic narration bowed to the contemporary stringencies imposed by Prague’s Barrandov film studios during the “normalisation” period. The film amounts to a simple assignment, but it is greatly boosted by the cast. The dominant roles are taken by Andrea Čunderlíková (brave student Lenka) and Josef Somr (the heroine’s unsuspecting father).