Word: czech
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...this ties in poorly with the other parts of the film, which begins as a sort of underworld Taking Off. (Taking Off is another first American film by a Czech director, also concerned with drugs, but in a middle-class milieu.) Unlike Taking Off, Passer's film switches suddenly from slick comedy to terror and sordidness as JJ's companion mistakenly shoots himself up with rat poison intended for JJ and crumples to his death. JJ drags him to an elevator, then flees in fright. The body lies inert across the doorway, the arms flexing up over the chest...
Passer--I haven't seen his other feature, a 1965 Czech comedy cum pathos called Intimate Lighting--seems able to get what he wants out of actors and settings, including a new side to George Segal--but he hasn't done enough yet to know what he should want. Where Milos (Taking Off) Forman maintains comedy almost consistently, and John Schlesinger in Midnight Cowboy--another New York film by a non-American--invests even his comedy with mournfulness. Passer switches erratically from the theatrical, wisecracking comedy when Segal performs so well to genuine gutwrenching--to say nothing...
Vlasta, however, is anxious to keep politics and propaganda out of the case. She has adamantly refused to see Czech journalists or pose for photographs. "This is a private matter," she told TIME Correspondent Strobe Talbott. "I just want my children to come back home and live with their mother. I can give them love and a good home." Indeed, the home to which the children would return seems secure and wholesome. Vlasta, a component designer for a construction company, and her second husband, who is working his way through catering school, share with her parents a comfortable six-room...
...Good Home. The Czech press headlined Vlasta's setback and for three days blasted away about the "kidnaping." Then the Czech government apparently decided to cool the publicity and generate some diplomatic heat instead, even though the State Department is powerless to intervene, or even comment, while the case is in a U.S. court. If the court ruled against Vlasta, a Czech Foreign Ministry official warned, "Czech-American relations will be disturbed for a long time to come." The Czechs also say that they are prepared to put pretty Vlasta, 31, on display at a press conference...
Meanwhile, the debate over the children has grown emotionally supercharged. The story is circulating in Yucaipa that just before he died, Gabriel told several people that he was a political prisoner and was being used as a human guinea pig in a Czech cancer-research center prior to escaping-events that Vlasta hotly denies and indeed seem unlikely. Last November the children appeared on an NBC television news program expressing their wish not to go back to the place where "they put daddy in prison because he believed in God." That appeal generated considerable response from the people of Yucaipa...