''Men Without Wings'' () is a 1946 Czech

drama film In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. The drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular ...

directed by

František Čáp František Čáp (7 December 1913 – 12 January 1972), also known as Franz Cap in Germany, was a Czech and later a Yugoslav film director and screenwriter. He directed 32 films between 1939 and 1970. Having created Slovene film classics such as ...

. It was entered into the

1946 Cannes Film Festival The 1st annual Cannes Film Festival was held from 20 September to 5 October 1946. Twenty-one countries presented their films at the "First Cannes International Film Festival", which took place at the former Casino of Cannes. Only one year after t ...

, where it was one of the winners of the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, later known as the

Palme d'Or The (; ) is the highest prize awarded to the director of the Best Feature Film of the Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. It was introduced in 1955 by the festival's organizing committee. Previously, from 1939 to 1954, the festiv ...

Plot

The film takes place in the occupied Republic of Czechoslovakia after the

assassination Assassination is the willful killing, by a sudden, secret, or planned attack, of a personespecially if prominent or important. It may be prompted by political, ideological, religious, financial, or military motives. Assassinations are orde ...

Schutzstaffel The ''Schutzstaffel'' (; ; SS; also stylised with SS runes as ''ᛋᛋ'') was a major paramilitary organisation under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany, and later throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II. It beg ...

Obergruppenführer (, ) was a paramilitary rank in Nazi Germany that was first created in 1932 as a rank of the ''Sturmabteilung'' (SA) and adopted by the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) one year later. Until April 1942, it was the highest commissioned SS rank after ...

and General der Polizei

Reinhard Heydrich Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich ( , ; 7 March 1904 – 4 June 1942) was a German high-ranking SS and police official during the Nazi era and a principal architect of the Holocaust. He held the rank of SS-. Many historians regard Heydrich ...

, head of the

Reich Security Main Office The Reich Security Main Office ( , RSHA) was an organization under Heinrich Himmler in his dual capacity as ''Chef der Deutschen Polizei'' (Chief of German Police) and , the head of the Nazi Party's ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS). The organization's stat ...

, the combined security services of

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German Reich, German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a Totalit ...

, and acting Reichsprotektor of the

Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was a partially-annexation, annexed territory of Nazi Germany that was established on 16 March 1939 after the Occupation of Czechoslovakia (1938–1945), German occupation of the Czech lands. The protector ...

. In

Prague Prague ( ; ) is the capital and List of cities and towns in the Czech Republic, largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. Prague, located on the Vltava River, has a population of about 1.4 million, while its P ...

on 27 May 1942. Jirka is a boy whose family was murdered in the village of

Lidice Lidice (; ) is a municipality and village in Kladno District in the Central Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 600 inhabitants. Lidice is built near the site of the previous village, which was completely destroyed on 10 June 19 ...

as repercussions for the assassination of Heydrich. He stays with his uncle, engineer Petr Lom and Marta, a young girl living next door, who works at the post office to help take care of the boy. Lom has just started working on the military airport, governed by Sudeten-Nazi Ullman. Resistance is quite active in the airport, collecting arms and grenades and communicating with allies. They have a lot of great intel thanks to secretary Jana Tomešová, who is Ullman's trustee and has access to a lot of restricted information. Jirka also starts working at the airport, but he is filled with sorrow and in need of revenge. He gets caught stealing a grenade and is arrested by the

Gestapo The (, ), Syllabic abbreviation, abbreviated Gestapo (), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of F ...

, and later shot. When Jana sees him she faints and Ullman finds a secret message she had with her. He tells his Gestapo friends and goes to the warehouse to investigate where he gets killed by being pushed onto a transformer. The Gestapo start arresting and searching houses of airport workers, revealing that Marta is an informer for the Germans. Lom is not aware of this as he is still struck by Jirka's death. He picks the gun from his hideout and walks back to the airport. After the neighbours tell him the truth about Marta, Lom kills her and helps Jana escape. Germans gather airport workers and threaten to kill them if no one says who killed Ullman. Then Lom appears saying he did it and kills some Gestapo officers, he is killed by the soldiers. In the last scene of the film, a dying Lom has a vision of the future. He sees a woman with gun going forward with war atrocities around her. However she does not stop until the war is over and the Czechoslovak flag appears on a mast.

Cast

* Gustav Nezval as Engineer Petr Lom * Ladislav H. Struna as Chief Engineer Bureš * Jaroslav Zrotal as Engineer Pavlík * Vladimír Hlavatý as Engineer Karas * Jan W. Speerger as Engineer Vondra *

Jaroslav Seník Jaroslav (also written as Yaroslav or Jarosław in other Slavic languages) is a Czech and Slovak first name, pagan in origin. Its feminine form is Jaroslava. There are several possible origins of the name Jaroslav. It is very likely that origi ...

as Zeman * Ladislav Hájek as Jirka * Karel Peyr as Director of the airport *

Eduard Linkers Eduard Linkers (11 October 1912 – 3 April 2004) was an Austrian actor. He appeared in more than 70 films between 1936 and 1988. Life He was born as Eduard Linker to a family of Jewish descent in Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary. He studied act ...

as Ullmann * Jiřina Petrovická as Secretary Jana Tomešová * Pavla Vrbenská as Post office worker Marta Pohlová

References

External links

* {{Palme d'Or 1946 films 1940s war drama films 1940s Czech-language films Czechoslovak black-and-white films Films directed by František Čáp Palme d'Or winners Czech resistance to Nazi occupation in film Czech war drama films 1946 drama films Czech World War II films Czechoslovak World War II films