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N.Y. TIMES REVIEW
Screen: 'Black Peter':Forman's 1964 Movie at Cinema Village
Print Save By ROGER GREENSPUN
Published: July 21, 1971


Although it opened only yesterday, at the Cinema Village, "Black Peter" was made in 1964 and was the first full-length movie by the Czechoslovak director Milos Forman—who then went on to make "Loves of a Blonde," "Firemen's Ball," and, in America, "Taking Off." I originally saw "Black Peter" six years ago, at the third New York Film Festival, and I didn't much like it. But I liked it a lot when I saw it again the other day, which may prove that anything, even a movie critic, can improve with time.

It may prove something else, however; a law I'd never care to formulate, but which might suggest that certain works of art, and especially certain movies, only get to look as good and as individual as they really are after their time has past. "Black Peter" is very much a film of the early nineteen-sixties, of the life styles and movie styles of the time, and when it first played here, I think that many of us had grown prematurely weary of the early nineteen-sixties — and of the era of cultural cross-fertilization that brought the techniques and subjects of the New Wave and the Twist and the bikini to Eastern Europe.

But now Forman's obligations, though no less apparent, seem less important. And the style, which had looked like feeble imitation, reveals itself as a personal understanding of a particularly subtle, genial, unassertive kind. "Unassertive" may be the operative word here, for Forman's specialty in "Black Peter" is a comedy so quiet that it sometimes becomes positively mute.

Peter (Ladislav Jakim), at the age of 17, takes a job in a supermarket, where he is made store detective. Like Truffaut's Antoine Doinel, to whom he is a kind of inarticulate first cousin, he thus finds himself in a position of considerable low-level responsibility, with which he is completely unable to cope.

He arrests no shoplifters—though he does follow one suspicious character all the way home without stopping him because he can't think of what he should say. With similar mastery he courts his girl (Pavla Martinkova) and suffers the lectures on success and manly labor, that are regularly provided him by his father (Jan Ostroil, in an ultimately hilarious performance).

"Black Peter" doesn't really have a story, even in the way that Truffaut's Antoine movies have stories, and, given Forman's comic vision, it is proper that it should not. Instead it has a series of events and interconnected anecdotes and a sense, absolutely unassailable, that even behind its most threatening mask, life bares a face of disarming helplessness. "Black Peter" isn't about anything so pretentious as the brotherhood of man, but it acknowledges a brotherhood of man (and women) that is at once consoling and quite sadly funny.

For the most part, "Black Peter" is about a small town's summer months, and I cannot remember a film so wonderfully sensitive to summer pleasures. Teen-age dances, swimming in a river, a band concert, luncheons, songs by local talent at the central restaurant. Forman's studies of amateur musical aspiration would in themselves make a movie, and his willingness to value such aspiration at any level of achievement would go a long way toward indicating in what spirit a movie ought to be made.

Nobody, finally, can say what he means, and so everybody stumbles into an embarrassed, or merely feckless, silence. This is very funny, but more importantly it is also very true. For in that pause between the gesture and the word, between the intention and the meaning, lies the unspoken, the all but unspeakable awareness of the painful joy of daily living.


BLACK PETER, directed by Milos Forman; screenplay (Czechoslovak with English subtitiles) by Mr. Forman, Jaroslav Papousek, and Ivan Passer; photography by Jan Nemecek; music by Jiri Slitr; produced by the Czechoslovak State Film Production Company; released by Billings Associates. At the Cinema Village. 12th Street, east of Fifth Avenue. Running time: 85 minutes. (Not submitted at this time to the Motion Picture Association of America's Production Code and Rating Administration for rating as to audience suitability.
Peter . . . . . Ladislav Jakim
Paula . . . . . Pavla Martinkova
Lada . . . . . Pavel Sedlacek
Peter's Father . . . . . Jan Ostroil
Peter's Mother . . . . . Bozena Matuskova
Cenda . . . . . Vladimir Puchholt
Zdenek . . . . . Zdenek Kulhanek