All My Good Countrymen (1969)

Too much of everything

Simply Perfect

Purely Joyful Movie!

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

This may not be a good place to start to enjoy Czech film - there are more accessible New Wave films - but it is a very powerful film which should not be missed by anybody who has more than a passing familiarity with the country and its history. With actors such as Radoslav Brzobohatý, Vladimír Menšík, a young Jíří Kodet, and the ever-popular singer and actor Waldemar Matuška, the film has a first-rate cast. In Jaroslav Kučera, it had a great cinematographer. Jasný was by now an accomplished screenwriter and, the countryside of the Pardubice region was as beautiful a backdrop as the machinations of the early communist period and, in particularly, the collectivisation of agriculture, were a fascinating subject. Still, the excellence of the film was not a given. The structure, given in large part by alternating dramatic changes of the environment as the seasons change and those first years after the communist takeover roll on, is effective and well-paced and permits a continuity of tone and subject with certain more episodic elements. The plot, on the page, might come across as busy, but on the screen, there is plenty of breathing space, and room for exquisite shots of the countryside, of work, even of play. So too does the heroic refusal to compromise of one of the characters, František, which becomes of increasing importance as the film moves into the mid 1950s, do nothing to detract from the well-balanced portrayal of the various characters of the village, described and referred to by their silly nicknames from the opening scenes in the months after the war. The history and fates of these characters are handled deftly, often with a brevity and telling detail of a John Cheever story. Neither is the film as unremittingly brutal as others handling similar material, such as the excellent, and thematically similar Smuteční slavnost of the following year. Like that film, I hope to return to Všichni dobří rodáci many times yet, and am sure it will repay repeated viewing.

It's hard to argue with the assessment of the village elder who comes to the conclusion that "politics is filth" in ALL MY GOOD COUNTRYMEN. The "conversion" of the happy troupe to The Cause (first One, and then the Other) speaks volumes- most of it bad. Franz Kafka would've no doubt greatly appreciated a movie like this one; it's just so Right in its depiction(s). Beautifully shot and directed, ALL MY GOOD COUNTRYMEN is must-see for anyone even remotely interested in the filthy game of Politics. (Just yesterday, a Universal Health Care bill was finally passed in this country, after what has to have been the sleaziest Media onslaught by the Republican Reich we've ever seen. Somebody in this country needs to make a movie about THAT...) That a movie like ALL MY GOOD COUNTRYMEN could even be made in a country as oppressive as theirs is nothing less than a miracle. One can't help but recall the final line from the Epilogue: "When they start singing, you'll hear them."

'All My Good Countrymen' is a curious little Czech movie that tells how a small village fell into Communism.A small little blip of a town suddenly has a pro-communism group banging their fists on the table demanding that farmers give up their land for a new farming policy that is more in line with party policy. The villagers not surprisingly, are dead set against it. The village then goes through almost a cycle of mysterious arrests of townspeople who are anti-Communism, trying to pressure the farmers to sign a commie card, and the very curiously high mortality rate of the Party members, I actually liked the variety of characters in this movie, and their interactions with each other. The big problem I have with this movie is it's lethargic pacing. The film just crawls and crawls to its conclusion, which is sort of well, anti-climatic.

An excellent film that takes a group of villagers as allegorical characters for Czechoslovakian society. The film follows these people from post-WWII (and pre- communism) to the late 50s, watching as they and their village change. In terms of the unescapable creeping feeling of dread, I was reminded of Ang Lee's _The Ice Storm_. While the film is clumsy at times (some shots or plot shifts might have been done better), the cinematography can be very resourceful. Watch also for the classic symbols of Czech identity: the geese, the white horse (from the legend of Libuse), and the old women (from the Czech novel _Babicka_). These mirror the plot nicely.