Der fünfte Reiter ist die Angst

Superlative camera angles for a Sixties film! Zbynek Brynych is one of the most important Czech directors after Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel and animator Jiri Trnka. The film is about the Nazi Holocaust while it is never openly stated in the film. The confiscated property of the Jews sent to concentration camps and a chimney emitting black smoke are the only close indirect indicators of the main subject. I couldn't spot the word Jews in the English subtitles. The visuals did show the Swastika in a casual manner on printed matter. The use of a young boy and the ominously empty streets are the highlights of the director's creativity. There are two different sequences of two different men on a bicycle--the differences speak volumes, even though the location is the same one. Varied reactions of the building's inhabitants, who knew each other, in the final sequence are amazingly well-captured by the director and his incredibly talented cinematographer Jan Kalis.

I saw this movie when I was a teenager and it's stayed with me ever since. Why it has never been digitalized for VHS and/or DVD is a mystery to me. This movie captures the true essence of horrible Nazi atrocities without today's special effects or computer graphics and is able to communicate it's primal message to the viewer with the best acting, directing and film noir that I've ever seen. Strangely, the film (titled "The Fith Horseman is Fear" for American audiences) leaves you with a sense of hope and is somewhat uplifting - I strongly recommend it and hope that this message helps attract enough attention for someone to format it for home viewing.

It even more painful to realize that there are maybe thousands of those unknown gems from the other side of the former Iron Curtain; of course not large audiences movies, maybe too intellectual but that's precisely why they are so interesting. This kind of topic could have been told in France, or any other western country. I could think about French MR KLEIN, the closest scheme to this one. Those Polish or Czech films, shot in black and white, were all gloomy, depressing, obscure, but so well filmed, with such camera work skills. I highly recommend it to any WW2 related gem diggers.

The Fifth Horseman is Fear is one of those remarkable classics of the Czech so-called New Wave film making, until it was suppressed by the Communist government (and this film, incidentally was banned there). This is one of my most favorite films and I have been waiting and waiting for it to become available (it used to be distributed by Orion Films). Finally, the DVD was issued, and I discovered that one of the key scenes is omitted. This scene, the protagonist's visit to a Nazi brothel (in the course of his search for morphine for the wounded resistance fighter) was one of the original highlights of an already wonderful film. So what happened? Was it censored in the copy that the DVD people used? If anyone has any information about this or as to how I can find the "real" thing, I'd be grateful.

Really great Czech film of the 60´s. I think the best picture by the director Zbynek Brynych. Armin Braun (performed by Miroslav Machacek) is a doctor of Jewish origin. In spite of the fact he could be killed by the Nazis and the whole block-of-flat with him, he is performing an operation of an injured revolter. While the operation is finished he has to find morphine to give it to the revolter because of big pains he has after the medical help.

We can see the excellent performance of Miroslav Machacek in the monologue part (by the way which lasts 3 minutes!!) in which he is deciding to help or not to help. I can recommend this movie to everyone who likes great acting in a good story.