Watch I Served the King of England For Free

Redundant and unnecessary.

Film Perfection

Did you people see the same film I saw?

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Great movie, with plenty of political, brilliant jokes and black humor, interesting stories, like a parody of the war and to life itself. Someone get lucky in life and that is so.

We had to wait decades for Jiří Menzel's realisation of Hrabal's fantastic novel – one of my all-time favourite books. Menzel has lost none of his joy, sensuality and lust for life, and the result is a film brimming with invention.The book is the story of Jan Dítě, a smart but rather unsympathetic character whose "only aim in life is to be a millionaire", and his fortunes and misfortunes as Czechoslovakia passes from prosperous (or even, as here, sybaritic) republic, through Nazi occupation into Communism; a kind of Pilgrim's Progress through to a unique emancipation (which Menzel, a little confusingly, intercuts throughout).Indeed, Hrabal may have intended Dítě to be symbolic of his country as a whole: a small, new country (dítě=child), downtrodden but rather cocky to begin, rapidly gaining in wealth and stature until cruelly divided on Nazi occupation between active resistance and passive collaboration; ambitious immediately after the war until crushed again, this time almost willingly, by Communism, then finally achieving a kind of nemesis in spite of itself. This may unduly romanticise the Communist régime, but I find Hrabal is a little guilty of this, despite being ironically critical elsewhere; perhaps he had to be. (I am English so forgive me if I have got this all wrong). Even so, his book (like others before) was rejected by the authorities in 1975 and remained unpublished for many years. Even the title was ironic: Dítě, of course, serves the Emperor of Ethiopia, not the King of England, who had been served by the head waiter of the Hotel Paříž. As Dítě observes, this honour did him no good when he was taken away by the Nazis — just as Czechoslovakia was expediently shafted at Munich in 1938 by her English "allies".***Minor spoiler in next paragraph*** Menzel's portrayal of the young Dítě is a little Chaplinesque, perhaps to enable the viewer to identify more readily with a character who, in Hrabal's hands, is less ambiguous and sympathetic. He also possibly overplays the slapstick a little, though again this may be his way of presenting Hrabal's wonderful storytelling, the condensing of which into under 2 hours of film is a true feat. But the film is such a joy to watch, from the droll introduction (which, incidentally, does not come from the book, in which Dítě only gets 2 years in prison), through the horrors and ambiguities of war, to the paradisiacal ending, that all minor quibbles are forgiven.The two actors playing Dítě are superb, the set pieces perfectly choreographed, the sense of history in progress impeccable. And it's fun. Fans of the sublime "Closely Observed Trains" and "Postřižiny" (two earlier Hrabal/Menzel collaborations) will surely not be disappointed. Conversely, if you loved this film and desire more, I urge you to seek out these earlier masterpieces.Here is Menzel with a big budget, and he's wonderful. It's been worth the wait.

The works of Czech director Jiri Menzel constitute a tasty cocktail of humanism and laughter. In this film, the cocktail is personified in the words spoken by the narrator and lead character early in the film: "It was always my luck to run into bad luck." Menzel's innocent male country bumpkins have simplistic goals in life—-get rich and charm the beautiful woman in their horizon. His films remind you of the social satire embedded in the works of Charles Chaplin and the visual gags in the cinema of Buster Keaton. Only Menzel's body of work has a dose of moral ambiguity. While Menzel's cinema is often mistaken as being solely his own genius, he actually rides on the shoulders of three major literary giants of the former Czechoslovakia—Bohumil Hrabal, Vladislaw Vancura, and Zedenek Sverak. Menzel's cinema provides a convenient "easy read." of the fine literary tradition to which Milan Kundera belongs by bringing alive on screen slivers of statements and observations recorded by these novelists. Menzel's true gift is making the written word look attractive on screen with the use of imaginative visual gags. The spoken words (the writer's contribution) and carefully chosen actors serve as the pivot to enjoy the visual feast in Menzel's cinema. His mastery of visual comedy has made a major difference to Czech cinema being associated with comedy rather than drama, quite unlike other East European cinema where tragedies and serious drama overshadowed the comedy genre.This film happens to be the sixth work of Hrabal that Menzel has adapted on screen—-the first being "Closely watched trains."Politicians find satire uncomfortable. It is not surprising that Hrabal's novel "I served the King of England" was banned for years. When ultimately Menzel made it into a movie in 2006 using Hrabal's script, it won the FIPRESCI prize at Berlin. Menzel's cinema (and Hrabal's novels) has considerable political and social criticism. The film opens with clemency/pardon given to a prisoner who has almost completed his jail term. Communist political bigwigs wish to ape the capitalists, without a clue of what is required to gain social respect. Hrabal's script is clearly critical of the communist regime: "People who said social work was ennobling were the same men who drank all night and ate with lovely young women seated on their knees.' Butlers act superior to their new masters who do not know social etiquette. The new Czech communist politicos bend over backwards to please any one with the remotest Russian credentials. It is no small wonder that Hrabal got into trouble with the authorities until the political regime changed in recent years. Apart from political criticism, social criticism of Czechs get liberally dished out in the film. When the physically short-statured waiter Jan Dite (literally translated as Johnny Child) throws coins on the floor for fun, rich and poor Czechs crawl without social distinction on the floor to pick up the money, allowing the short-statured waiter to look down at those he was serving and emerge physically and socially "tall" for a brief period. There is another line that Hrabal/Menzel uses to describe Czechs and their actions over the decades "Czechs do not fight wars—therefore we were not invaded, we were annexed." These are lines that will make many laugh, but these lines could make the author/ the director unpopular with a few who cannot take self criticism.The quest for money and riches underpin this film in particular and much of Menzel's cinema. The film has the lead character selling sausages at a railway station. So engrossed is he in counting the change he has to return to a customer who has given him a big bank note, that the train pulls out with the angry customer fuming that he has been cheated. But Hrabal and Menzel had together done a similar scene in "Closely watched trains" where a train pulls out as the young hero is about to kiss his love with eyes closed, taking away his beloved girl whose eyes are open and is agitated that the kiss was missed.Money is a recurring theme in "I served the King of England." The hero dreams of being a millionaire. One colorful character keeps himself amused spreading out cash on the floor like a carpet. Money is what waiter's get if he is good and smart, enough to buy up the hotel. He gets a medal from an Ethiopian Head of State, modeled on the physical attributes of Haile Selassie; merely because he can bend down to receive it. He gets a fat tip because he is physically near to a rich guest doling out his largesse.After one has laughed sufficiently, one could reflect on the less obvious but darker side of Hrabal/Menzel's contribution to cinema. The women are lovely to look at. They bear a striking common factor—they are to be won. They are to be used, often as useful commodities. One Nazi girl even makes love, thinking of Hitler during the act. You do not see Hrabal and Menzel developing the women characters as they do their male ones. In this film, the anti-hero is dismissed from his job because he is not a good Czech."I served the King of England" are the spoken credentials of a respected waiter in the film as he trains the lead character of the film. Yet, the film is about a successful Czech who became a millionaire as he had dreamt, who married a Nazi and had enjoyed life when other Czechs were being led to the gas chambers, and was imprisoned when the Communists came to power. Hrabal and Menzel may have given us great comedy over six films. Evaluate the content closely and there is more to their work than pure comedy.

Like the butler played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1994 film "The Remains of the Day", the waiter at the centre of "I Served the King of England" (Jiri Menzel, Czech Republic, 2006) is not interested in politics. Major historical events surround him, yet these completely escape his attention. His ambition is simply to become a millionaire, like the fat cats he serves at table. In 1930s Prague, Hitler, in Berlin, is making a radio announcement about his aim to "liberate" the Sudetenland. Bored, Jan Dite, the waiter, simply turns the dial to a dance music station.He manages to float through the Nazi invasion, first of the Sudetenland, then of Czechoslovakia. By a combination of hook and crook, he achieves his ambition of owning his own hotel through the sale of valuable stamps, stolen from a vanished Jewish family. This does not give him a moment's pause but later, when he sees a trainload of Jews in cattle-cars moving off to Auschwitz, he has a rush of compassion and chases after the train in an attempt to hand the deportees a sandwich. After the war, as a self-confessed millionaire, he is sent to prison when his hotel is nationalised. He emerges fifteen years later, older, but not much wiser. He is Schweik, but without the latter's sly intelligence.This sketchy summary cannot do justice to a film which has been described as a near-flawless masterpiece, in which "Prague has never looked better". It is permeated with the ironic wit which marked Menzel's earlier films, such as the Academy Award winning Closely Watched Trains (1966). Dite befriends the German girl Liza, described by one reviewer as "the sweetest little Nazi in the history of the cinema". They are in bed, making love in the missionary position. Liza keeps pushing his head aside so that she can gaze at the big picture of Adolf Hitler on the opposite wall. Such was love in the Third Reich. The scene in which Dite is undergoing a racial fitness test which involves giving a sperm sample is intercut with young Czech men being unloaded from a lorry at an execution ground. Of this, Dite is blissfully unaware.The Remains of the Day was based on a serious and perceptive novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. The genesis of I Served the King of England, by contrast, was a comic novel by Bohumil Hrabal, a book I cannot wait to get my hands on. Any offers?