The Shop on Main Street (1965)

 Jan Kadar & Elmar Klos's "The Shop on Main Street"


The 1965 Czechoslovakian film "The Shop on Main Street" iterates familiar concepts we've come to understand about the World War II period of Europe, particularly the roaming laws against Jews. Various filmmakers approach these subjects in different ways and from different angles. Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos decided to balance the tragedy with humor, resulting in a film that points out the absurdities of these conditions and do so in a commercial format.

The film centers on a carpenter named Tono, who is chosen by his Nazi brother-in-law to become the Aryan controller of an elderly Jewish widow's haberdashery (as part of the Aryanization program happening in the First Slovak Republic at the time). The Jewish woman, Rozalia, is nearly deaf and assumes the man is there to be a helper. The Jewish community takes Tono in, even giving him a stipend for assisting the elderly Rozalia. However, when the Jewish population is forced to evacuate, Tono must decide how to hide Rozalia.

At times, I felt as though the film was reiterating concepts from this period that had already been iterated more aptly in other films. At other times, I felt the film had a stark originality to its story and concepts. Overall, the film still manages to take these dark and lurid historical notions and create new meaning within a new story. For this, it's a success.



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