4xblu received a pair of titles from Arrow Video’s online store today. The latest arrivals consisted of one new addition, “The Shop on the High Street” by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos (which is actually a Second Run title; the label began offering their discs through the Arrow store in early 2016), and one restock, Joe Dante’s “Matinee.”
Though generally thought of as Czech filmmakers, neither Ján Kadár or Elmar Klos was born in Czechoslovakia, since the country didn’t exist until eight years after Klos’s 1910 birth in Moravia and nearly seven months after Kadár was born in Hungary on April 1st of 1918. However, both were among those who became Czechoslovakians after the new country was cobbled together in the wake of the Austro-Hungarian empire’s demise. Kadár and Klos each started out as a documentarian before moving on to narrative films, with their first collaboration in 1952 being a spy film called “Kidnapped.” From the beginning they clashed with the authorities; the release of “Kidnapped” took no less than the intercession of the great Soviet director Pudovkin and 1958’s “Three Wishes” led to the duo serving a five year ban.
Their breakthrough would come with 1965’s “The Shop on the High Street,” which began a stretch of four consecutive years where Czechoslovakia’s submission for the Best Foreign Film Oscar would earn a nomination (two of them, “The Shop on the High Street” and Jirí Menzel’s “Closely Observed Trains,” won). At a time when all 17 previous Best Foreign Film winners had come from only four countries (France, Italy, Sweden, and Japan), Kadár and Klos’s win put Czechoslovakia on the map and led to awareness of the so-called Czech New Wave, a talented group of young Czech filmmakers (many of whom had been students of the duo at the Prague film school where they’d taught).
Alas, Kadár and Klos would only make one more film together after “The Shop on the High Street,” as Kadár left for the United States after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and Klos stayed. Kadár would return so that they could finish the film, called “Adrift,” but then returned to America afterward.