Smrt v sedle

Without the pulp storyline, this could have been another one of Krška’s adaptations of Šrámek: lyrical shots of the countryside, young love and perfectly groomed actors. Western poetics show up in the film only suggestively in the form of singing country songs, twirling a lasso and the tediously filmed cantering of a horse with the typically Russian name of Ivan. The insipid crime plot gets going only after some forty minutes of playing at cowboys, which is shown as an irresponsible and even dangerous pastime that every proper socialist citizen should turn away from in favour of more sensible ways to spend their leisure time in adulthood. Unlike in genuine westerns, the main character is not a bold individualist who acts according to his own reasoning, but a naïve farmer who follows the orders of the mature horsemen. Other than serving as a witness, he is useless in solving the crime that has been committed. Instead of unbridled action in the open countryside, the film’s most dramatic scenes are a relatively peaceful ride along well-maintained roads, while all the potentially dangerous action is coordinated by officers of the National Security Corps. Beside the CinemaScope format, western culture is represented only by bad guys who have foreign names, speak foreign languages and are capable of killing for money. The domestic effort to meet the demand for exotic western-style movies thus spawned an almost perfect negation of horse operas and the values that they represented. However, nothing can change the fact that the viewers of the time, who were hungry for any kind of adventure, were extraordinarily satisfied and more than two million of them had seen it in the cinema by the end of 1959. 50% (04.03.2015)