Film

Working in an epic, wry-humored picaresque style, Menzel (best-known for 1966’s Closely Watched Trains) returns to the mid-20th-century era that has defined Eastern Europe ever since. Released circa 1960 from a Czech prison after 14 years and nine months (as he dryly observes, his sentence was 15 years, but he lucked out with a general amnesty), Jan Díte (Kaiser) recalls his strange rise and fall through the economic hardships of the 1930s and the Nazi occupation of the 1940s.

Young Jan (Barnev) dreams of being a millionaire and owning a hotel. He’s fascinated by the things people will do for money (in one recurring bit, he drops coins on the ground so he can watch well-off people crawl after spare change) and by women. Jan works his way up the chain from waiting tables in a small bar to head waiter at the classiest hotel in Prague. Barnev sells the charms of this physically diminutive imp with mugging double takes and a comic, Chaplinesque funny walk.

Eventually, Jan falls for a German girl and ends up running a spa for Nazi soldiers. Menzel’s larger message about how good people get tangled up in bad things never quite gels (it’s harder to sympathize with Jan when he buys a hotel with stolen Jewish wealth), and things drag a bit in the last third, but the movie is mostly carried on Barnev’s breezy charms.