The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis
Juraj Herz’s Spalovač mrtvol, from Ladislav Fuks, is a very dark Czech comedy about Nazism, occupation and the Holocaust. Karl Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrusínský, superb) is in charge of daily operations at a Prague crematorium. He is obsessed with the rapidity with which corpses can be turned into dust. A Jewish neighbor, Dr. Bettelheim, assures Karl that ashes, whatever a human’s ethnicity, are identical. When Prague is occupied by Germans, a Nazi friend informs Karl that his wife Lakmé’s mother was Jewish, making Karl’s son and daughter quarter-Jewish, and that terrible suffering is in store for Jews. After denouncing the crematorium director, Karl ascends to his post and oversees Lakmé’s cremation, having tricked his wife into hanging herself. He bludgeons their “effeminate” boy and stuffs his body in with someone headed for cremation. Daughter will be next. Meanwhile, Karl is invited to apply his skills to a secret program of Jewish extermination. Karl’s mind collapses into the insanity that such mass murder will liberate Jews from death’s alternative in their case: insupportable suffering.
Kopfrkingl appears in every scene and nearly every shot; this helps Herz draw us into the film’s revelation of an increasingly unhinged mind. But Kopfrkingl was strange to begin with. The spotless bathroom is his favorite room in his house. We know that he is planning to kill his bespectacled son when he applies a comb briefly to the boy’s scalp and then, just as quickly, to his own—his habit with laid-out corpses. His talk is endlessly about the wonderful state of death.
Herz’s Kafkaesque black-and-white film is loaded with paranoid closeups, especially eyes, including the eyes of “mute” animals at the zoo. Dvorák, who prepares the bodies until Karl denounces him and he hangs himself, works to the largo of Dvorák’s New World Symphony.
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