Pair from Prague

90DEG in the Shade. "Character is fate." The Heraclitean precept has been mislaid by a generation of moviemakers more concerned on the whole with their medium than with Man. In this resolutely ordinary yet oddly powerful little picture, a Czech director named Jiri (pronounced Yershee) Weiss, a British scriptwriter named David Mercer

(Morgan!), and a cast half Czech and half English have created an old-fashioned drama in which the action flows like bad blood from the heart of one unhappy man.

The man is a pudgy, middle-aged chap (Rudolf Hrusinski) who works as an inspector for a chain of grocery stores and looks like a small grey pig wearing spectacles. Humiliated by his appearance, he assumes a mask of in difference that puts off the people he works with and drives his wife (Ann Todd) to drink. Inevitably, the morbid love-hate of women that is hidden in the inspector's heart bursts out in an ambiguous compulsion to punish and to prowl.

One day compulsion tragically confuses his judgment. While taking inventory in a company store, he discovers that 79 bottles of expensive spirits have somehow been transfomed into 79 bottles of weak tea. When he questions the staff, a pretty young clerk (Anne Heywood) flies into hysterics and runs out of the shop. Excited by his sudden power to dominate what he desires, the inspector without further investigation decides that the girl is guilty and calls in the police. That night she kills herself. Next day the inspector discovers that she had only been protecting the real culprit: the handsome young manager of the store.

Shock knocks the scales off the in spector's eyes, and for one terrible instant he sees that he looks like a pig because he is a pig. For one terrible instant he stands ready to pay for the girl's life by taking his own. Next day, still looking like a small grey pig, the inspector is back on the job, back on the prowl. Character is fate.

The Hand. Czechoslovakia's Jiri Trnka is the Chagall of cinema. In his 18 puppet films (A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Emperor's Nightingale), he has bodied forth in speaking forms and singing colors a rich world of the spirit that for almost two decades has floated like a magical island in the grey sea of groupthink called Communism. In this tiny (19 minutes) but weighty puppet picture, Trnka (pronounced Trnka) has come right out with a wry but obviously heartfelt statement of the rights and wrongs of man in a totalitarian society.

The statement is made in a parable about a potter who is happy making pots. All day long the wheel turns and the plant on the window sill sings like a bird. Then one day the door to the potters shop bursts open and a vast impersonal Hand walks in. It smashes the potter's pots and arrogantly commands him to reshape them in the image of the Hand. When the potter refuses, it plies him with presents. When he continues to refuse, it threatens him with death. Finally it ties strings to his head and hands and turns him into an automaton that mass-produces Hand after Hand after Hand.

All day long the wheel turns but the plant no longer sings like a bird. One day the pot that holds the plant falls off a shelf and kills the potter. Free at last? Hardly. His funeral is arranged by the helping Hand.

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