Hotel Modrá hvezda

This film is now available on DVD in the Czech Republic. The DVD can be played with English language subtitles.

Terrifically charming light comedy about a young Czech girl (Natasa Gallova, who was really 29, though you wouldn't know it to look at her) who inherits a run-down hotel where three jazz musicians have been living rent free. Gallova is adorable, and I hope I can find more films with her. I was surprised to find on IMDb that, after a period of time away from the screen, she returned in the mid 1950s and continued to work for some years. She even had a small role in Juraj Herz wonderfully bizarre black comedy, "The Cremator" in 1969.

This delightful piece of escapist entertainment was made during World War Two, but there is no indication in the story of any war. There is no hint of propaganda, only fun and music, swing music for that matter. So if the Germans were cracking down degenerate art, swing doesn't seem to have been on the list, at least not in occupied Bohemia.

Dependable actor Oldrich Novy plays the rich playboy industrialist who is set on staying at the old hotel because his parents spent their honeymoon there. Adina Mandlova is his pretty, though stubborn, fiancée, who insists on planting herself at a modern hotel in a better district of the city, which has the same name.

The existence of two Blue Star Hotels in two different districts of the city is device used to create confusion in a number of situations, but the plot is much more inventive than that simple set-up, and the film is great fun. It is marred slightly only by a final conclusion that is brought about rather abruptly. Still, I greatly enjoyed The Blue Star Hotel.

I like this film very much. Adina Mandlova, who had a short career during the WWII in Germany, is lovely - but the fact that the performed there also put stop to her career in her homeland.

She was born Jarmila Anna Frantiska Marie Mandlova in a middle-class family in Mlada Boleslav. Her father Jan Mandl was a talented pianist who wanted to study music in Vienna, but when his father died, he became a railway inspector. He married his first wife and had two sons - Jan and Karel. When his wife died of tuberculosis, he married Mandlova's mother. She was an innkeeper's daughter. Together they had a son, and finally a daughter Adina. Her father chose her name inspired by Gaetano Donizetti's opera L'elisir d'amore.

There's good music and beautiful dresses and this whole film is a joy for the eyes.