Past

It would seem almost unrealistic that a 1950 film about the actions of a resistance group full of interrogations and secret notes could be any good, but it would have to not be directed by Frič. Shortly after the war, it was not yet customary for the universal template for depicting the Gestapo to be awkward caricatures. Everything, including the realities and emotions, was still vivid in memory, and even though The Trap only linearly tells the story of a single, transparent event in which a German confederate is set upon a heroic member of the Czech resistance, the result is a successful suspense film. The characters are not simply black and white, and particularly everything concerning the former actress Herta (played by the great Majka Tomášová) is worth paying attention to. The only thing that sounds disturbing is the choice of non-original music. It is highly unlikely that Friedrich Holländer's "Nimm dich in Acht vor blonden Frau'n" and other songs from the film The Blue Angel (1930), which was already passé during the war, and of course Marlene Dietrich was an enemy of the Reich as an American citizen at the time, would have been played as dance music in a café in the early 1940s. (2020.08.31)

The strongly naive final push felt like a kick to the balls compared to the chilling rest of the film, and I have to take a star away for that. Otherwise everything was fine - I felt sick from the scenes from Pankrác, Dalibor C. Vačkář once again composed great music and the actors were one hundred percent convincing. (2017.05.28)