Customer Reviews

I Served the King of England

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"I Served the King of England" is directed and adapted for the screen by Jiri Menzel, from the novel by Bohumil Hrabal that follows the tumultuous political environment of the mid-20th century in Czechoslovakia through the experiences of an ambitious young waiter. Released after serving 15 years in prison, Jan Dite (Oldrich Kaiser) recalls his life before he lost his freedom as he toils laying gravel for mountain roads. The younger Jan (Ivan Barnev) only ever aspired to one thing: He wanted to be a millionaire, to live the life of luxury and pleasure that his clients enjoyed. He moved from a pub to progressively more luxurious places of employment with increasingly wealthier clientele, finally ending up at Prague's most beautiful hotel, Hotel Paris, an idyll that was interrupted when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.

Like so many films from Eastern Europe, this one offers a sweeping perspective on the rapid social and political changes that afflicted its country from the 1930s to 1950s, from normalcy through the rise and fall of fascism and on to communism. But instead of characters who are victims of overwhelming political forces, we have Jan Dite, a single-minded, politically indifferent -if not actually oblivious- waiter. Jan wants money, women, and the finer things in life. And he cheerfully pursues them, too simple-minded to care about much else, but observant enough to notice that people all want those things no matter what else changes. His life is a satire of human ambition, comic even when it is tragic, with an ironic view of the devastation and turmoil surrounding World War II as it is seen through the eyes of someone who is just along for the ride.

The DVD (Sony 2009): The film is in Czech with optional English or French subtitles. But when German is spoken in the film, it isn't consistently subtitled. The only bonus feature is a theatrical trailer (2 min).

"I Served the King of England" is a real surprise. In Los Angeles theaters for half a second, I can't imagine this little Czech fable enjoyed a long theatrical run anywhere else. It's a shame. "King of England" is a delightful, fantastical little film directed by Jiri Menzel, the director behind "Closely Watched Trains", winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film in 1966.

The film opens with Jan Dite (Oldrich Kaiser) being released from prison and assigned to work in the forest, along with other cultural subversives. As he goes about refurbishing the run down cabin where he has been assigned to live, he remembers back to his early years, the years when all he wanted was to be a millionaire and own a posh, grand hotel. As we follow Jan (Ivan Barnev), he slowly works his way up from assistant waiter at a bar where intellectuals meet (and a prostitute entices him to her place of business introducing him to the pleasures of the flesh) to a fancy hotel in the country that caters to the whims of very rich men. He works his way up to the most grand and beautiful hotel in Prague. After he becomes the head waiter, World War II breaks out and Jan falls in love with a young German woman. Throughout these moments, the film follows Jan's rise from one job, each more important than the last, and also follows his sexual education from his initial meetings with a prostitute to his various affairs with different women.

I know, it sounds pretty pedestrian, like a million other films you have seen. Which is maybe the reason I didn't rush to the theaters to see it during it's theatrical release. But I was wrong. Very wrong. "I Served the King of England" is designed to look like a living fairy tale, even when World War II enters the film. Every scene has a slightly fantastical element or feel. But unlike "The Boy In The Striped Pajamas", the darker elements fit into this story smoothly, like the darker, scarier bits of a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. Jan literally floats his way through situations, always observing, trying to learn something that might help him later. Because he seldom speaks, Jan's antics could be modeled on Chaplin's.

When the Communists release him from prison, he moves to the country and meets another couple who are also outcasts and serving time in odd jobs. The couple, an older man and a younger woman (who Jan quickly determines was imprisoned because she is a nymphomaniac) are looking for trees to make into musical instruments. Jan and the couple become friends and Jan begins to lust after the younger woman. She realizes this and begins tormenting him, teasing him with flirtatious looks. But both are so good-natured about it, they both suspect nothing will ever happen and are just having fun with the process.

"I Served the King of England" is a rare find. Amusing, fun to watch, beautiful to look at, and fable like while maintaining a definite sense of a time and place. It is an enjoyable treat that deserves a bigger audience. Go rent it. Now.

Here's a stunning Czech sleeper loaded with so many aspects that it may take several viewings to pick up the details crammed into every shot. 'I Served the King of England' opens as a light, whimsical comedy featuring the antics of a diminutive and ambitious young waiter who wants nothing more than to make money. Ivan Barnev's peformance in the lead role is akin to Roberto Benigni's in 'Life is Beautiful,' the wonderful physicality of his humor and pratfalls, facial expressions, and comedic timing make for hilarious and touching viewing. The story is told back and forth from the perspective of an older, wiser Dite (played by Oldrich Kaiser) who is jailed by communists for the crime of being a millionaire, serving one year for each of the millions he made. The path Dite took to earn those millions is as surreal as European history itself, a history hijacked by a little Austrian corporal and a Georgian street thug. That surreal history slowly seeps into the film as Dite stumbles into a Nazi eugenics program, or his wife fervently stares at a portrait of Hitler as he makes love to her (and the wife herself briefly transmogrifies into the aforementioned diktator.)

The countryformerlyknownas Czechoslovakia is dismembered by German manuevers, British flipflopping before Churchill, and is finally devoured by that insatiable swatiska beast, yet Dite blithely continues onward, adopting a certain part to his hair, and growing a small square moustache. He collects all of the mirrors discarded by a local village, because the people believe that when they look into them, the Germans come. Sure enough, the mirror over Dite's marital bed begins to catch reflections of herr Hitler. Later in the film Dite sits before a dozen mirrors and literally reflects on his life, and each individual mirror holds its own tale of a younger Dite.

Every aspect of 'King of England' is that of a mature and accomplished filmmaker who won his first Academy back in 1966. There has been some criticism of the casual portrayal of prostitution in the film, but these are opinions made through an American filter. Many Eastern European countries had to make do with the bare necessities provided by the Germans and Russians for decades, so that sex as a trade for dinner became a sensible transaction.

If you are the type of person who idealizes foreign films, and finds them more complicated and subtle, the humor darker and sweeter, then 'I Served the King of England' will go right into your pantheon alongside 'Europa Europa', 'Life is Beautiful', or 'The Time of the Gypsies.'

There have been some complaints about the subtitles, but due to the playful nature of the film, I'm not sure that this wasn't deliberate. A character, such as Dite's wife, will speak for several seconds in German without translation, but his response to her, or the situation itself, or even occasional pauses in subtitling ensure that everything is eventually told. It may be that a modicum of thought by the viewer is required, and that puts some people off, and yes, you will even have to turn off your CellBerry and pay achtung!

... not Life in General, though that too is mugsy enough. I mean the foolish compulsion we 'readers' have, to compare films with the books they're based on. But in this case, the only reason I sought out this old film was to match it with the novel of the same title by Bohumil Hrabal, one of the great writers of the 20th C. Hrabal was also the author of "Closely Watched Trains", a novel made into an Oscar-winning film in 1967. It's a mystery to me why, with the publicity generated by two successful film adaptations of his novels, Bohumil Hrabal hasn't become more widely known and read in the English-reading world.

The novel "I Served the King of England" is Hrabal's most extroverted, least forthrightly autobiographical. The picaresque amatory exploits of its hero, the busboy-to-millionaire Diti, are far raunchier and more explicit in words than in cinematography; in fact, little Diti is by no means the charming underdog in the book that he is in the film. He's a darker soul, a sly simpleton in the tradition of picaresque literature, cynical and malevolent in the tradition of dwarves and midgets in Germanic/Slavic folk tales. The film gives us a Diti closer in nature to Charlie Chaplin in 'The Little Tramp', still sly but essentially gentle. There's a lot of Chaplin in director Jiri Menzel's cinematic realization of the novel, including explicit 'silent era' camerawork and direct allusions to Chaplin's 'Little Dictator'. The Diti of the film survives his raucous career as a 'servitor' of the vices of the Rich in pre-WW2 Prague, survives his incongruous marriage to a Hitler-worshiping Sudeten-German Czech woman of his own physical stature, survives the War in the most bizarre fashion, survives the fifteen years sentence he's given by the post-war Czech communists ... so far cleaving to the novel closely enough ... but then undergoes a metamorphosis into a sadder-but-wiser appealing humane old man. Both Ditis, of the novel and of the film, are essentially 'observers' of human folly, but the Diti of the film is less embittered and perhaps more forgiving, there in his mirror-lined hermitage.

The promo for the film implies that it's an erotic comedy, and some previous reviewers seem to have considered it so. Yes, there's some nudity, some 'artistic' camerawork revealing nubile breasts, but the overall sexual content is more kinky than erotic. Sexual lust is the most ludicrous of human appetites, more absurd than the lust for food, money, power, and Idealism, all of which are depicted as follies in the film and in the novel. Idealism, represented by Diti's wife's ardent Nazism, is the worst appetite of all, the most destructive and irrational. This is a 'pretty good' food movie, incidentally. The images of the banquets served in Diti's luxury hotels are much more appetizing than the sordid nudes, although the grotesque faces of the all-hungry plutocrats at the banquets are enough to spoil the feast.

"I Served the King of England" was a novel about history, the specific history of Czechoslovakia in the pre- and post-war decades. The character Diti was metaphoric of his country, little Czechia, married by love and hate to Germany. The reprisals of the Sudenten Germans against the Czechs, then the Czechs against their Germanic countrymen, and the mutual reprisals of rich against poor, poor against rich, are all elements of prime importance in the novel, as they are in all of Bohumil Hrabal's writings. Humans are chiefly fun-loving boors and victims of their own swinishness in Hrabal's worldview. Much of this comes across in the film, but I strongly suspect that many American viewers will have difficulty fitting the story into its historical context. "Readers" will have the advantage of knowing that Hrabal himself was married to a Sudeten-German Czech whose family had sided with Hitler and lost its wealth thereby. "Readers" will also know that Hrabal didn't thrive under Communism; his more forthrightly autobiographical novels depict his economic troubles, his sternly disapproved Bohemianism, and the difficulties he had with censorship. Even so, the tangential depiction of communism in the film is mild in its satire.

Whatever its relation to the novel, the film is a thoughtful comic caper, not quick-paced enough to have the viewer writhing and guffawing, but deliciously absurd throughout.

I highly recommend this movie. It is entertaining, not predictable, the acting is great. Loving it was a pleasant surprise. It's an old guy telling the story of his life and how he was interested in rich people and becoming rich himself. Note it's a foreign film with English subtitles.

I had never heard of this film when I picked it up and didn't know what to expect. If I'd known that it was made by the same man who did "Closely Watched Trains" I would have been prepared for something wonderful. I think this film is equally as good, maybe even better than "Closely Watched Trains" and that's saying a lot.

On one level it's very funny in a European understated way (not a thigh slapper). The two actors who play the main character at different times in his life are both wonderful.

The story involves a "small man" from a "small village" whose name translates to "child." Like a lot of small men, he aspires to greatness and following his inclinations he manages to work himself up from selling hotdogs at the train station to a becoming a multi-millionaire owner of a deluxe hotel. This is all done agains the backdrop of the entrance of Hitler's forces into Czechoslovakia, the war, then the retreat of the Germans and the takeover of the Communists.

The historical events are shown but only as they affect the man's life. It's his story. (As one who hasn't lived through such times I can only wonder at the choices people had to make.) Our hero ignores the political scene and is focused only on "normal things": his success and the pleasure he has found with the ladies. Along the way he falls in love with a German girl and doesn't have any scruples about marrying her.

If this makes him sound unsympathetic, the writing and the brilliant actor who plays the young fellow endear him to the viewer. He's a regular person and does what most regular people do---stumbles along. His unconcious innocence is finally shattered when his wife loses her life by rushing into the burning hotel to rescue the valuable stamps she has taken from the homes of deported Jews. His pixie cutenss suddenly changes to the bearing of a mature man. There's a wonderful line that says something like "you become human when your life has become derailed."

The scenes of the mature man show how he has mellowed and reconciled himself to his past and to himself. There are a lot of repeated elements in the film--the use of mirrors, crashing dishes, throwing things in the air--that add to the richness of the story.

I wish I could give the film more than five stars and I hope that word spreads so that more people can enjoy it.

When we first see Jan Dite he is an older man being released from a Czech communist prison. In a bit of gentle humor we learn how fortunate he is. An amnesty has set him free, after he only served 14 years and seven months of a 15-year sentence. His crime? That and other things we'll learn in this picaresque, softly ironic, slightly sarcastic comedy of Nazis and Communists, of getting along and of knowing when to move on. I Served the King of England is a marvelous movie by Jiri Menzel, the Czech director who gave us Closely Watched Trains 40 years earlier. While elements of the plot are discussed, there aren't any serious spoilers.

Jan Dite is a young man with all the innocence and practical self-interest of a hungry puppy. He is played by Ivan Barney, short, slim, with blond hair, blue eyes, and a face that, one person said, resembles a mix of, when young, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Roman Polanski and Derek Jacobi. One thing for sure, he's a fine actor. We meet the young man while he's selling sausages at a Czechoslovakia train station in the Thirties. Already he has developed techniques to increase his profit, but he's so earnest, so shy and sly, and so open about it all that we can't help encouraging him. When he realizes even the wealthy will get down on their knees to scrabble after a few coins, he knows he can do just as well as they do. His determination to be a millionaire takes hold. In his climb to success we're with him as he becomes a drinks server and table cleaner in a beer hall, a young man of all duties in a plush resort hotel for the very rich, and a waiter in the dining room of the Hotel Paris, the most beautiful hotel in Prague. Along the way we track his encounters with the arrogant, the wealthy, the helpful and a number of gorgeous prostitutes who service the elderly men who have money. There are voluptuous meals that include oysters, small birds, snails and naked girls, and Jan serves them all. He develops a talent for gracefully dancing around tables holding trays filled with full plates high above his head...and for decorating the naked tummies of lovely women with flowers, or currency, or even the left-over delicacies of a dinner. Roasted pineapple rings were never put to better use.

Then the director takes Jan and us into Hitler's takeover of Czechoslovakia, a marriage to a Sudeten lass who is so dedicated to the cause she gazes passionately at a photo of Hitler while poor Jan tries mightily to help make a baby. We visit Jan at work during the war, a wonderful vacation spot run by Himmler where naked Aryan young ladies gambol in the nude, waiting for scientifically selected studly soldiers to impregnate them so that there will be more perfect little blond babies for the Reich. The place soon will be used as a rehabilitation center for soldiers back from the Eastern front with missing limbs. Jan is there, serving and watching them all.

But thanks to many valuable stamps taken from the empty homes of Polish Jews by his wife, who left to serve at the front, eventually Jan has his dream come true...he becomes a millionaire after the war, and one who, no less, now owns that plush resort hotel. Jan's basic innocence doesn't prepare him for Communism. At least Jan succeeds in one thing, achieving the company of other millionaires.

I Served the King of England is satire, but gently served and with an appealing person in the young Jan Dite (and Dite means "child" in Czech), Picaresque it is, with imaginings of fast footwork, delighted sex, unexpected adventures, innocent opportunism and a funny and delightful score. Much like Closely Watched Trains, there are times when the reality of some of the situations is not amusing. I Served the King of England is that rare movie, a thing to thoroughly enjoy, with some deftly planted barbs so sharp you scarcely feel them.

For something akin to the spirit of the music score, not exactly but with that love for old-style swing, go to YouTube, type in Ondrej Havelka and then click to play the video short "Me To Tady Nebavi." Havelka is a contemporary bandleader and singer (and tap dancer) who recreates Czech swing using the appearance of old fashioned style film clips. Bring your love for the offbeat with you.

ability to grab your attention about the principals' goals in lif as a waiter. The trials and tribulations are hysterical, however there are many moments of grave seriousness as the timeline enters WWI (Germany). Its from Czechoslovakia and a dynamite evenings entertainment. Highly recommended.

In a young man's journey and quest to become a hotelier, the story is presented to the viewers. Embedded in the scences is humor, history, women, lust, ambition and philosophy. There is also plenty of nudity, which is beautifully done.

I have read the other reviews and am absolutely puzzled how they knew so much about this film, because the film's translation into English is the worst I have ever seen. They could not possibly have been based on the DVD.

It was impossible to watch the DVD: only a few words were translated for each scene thus leaving the viewer bewildered. The English is translated as though the translator only understood a few words, would put those down and them skip everything else that was said.

Other reviewers make this film sound interesting. Alas, I will never know because my version is useless.