Stín kapradiny

The film adaptation of the popular novel by the Czech writer Josef Capek is a dramatic story of two teenage boys, Ruda Aksamit, barely eighteen, and Vasek Kala, sixteen years of age. The two boys go on a poaching excursion in a forest and shoot a deer. They are surprised by a warden and Ruda, the elder of the two, shoots him dead. Previously, Ruda hay worked in a marble quarry with his father. His dreams and desires had been related to the forest and the hunt. Now the forest has become his destiny. After the murder of the gamekeeper the boys can never return home, and so flee in confusion and perplexity from justice, with the ill-advised notion that there is a fine and adventurous life ahead of them. Ruda grows more and more irritable. He hates people and is willing to liquidate anyone who gets in his way. The boys speak to a woman on the forest road who does not return their greeting. Both become concious of their shabby appearance and sack a country house to obtain at the least suits to wear. It produces some money for them as well and they go to a railway station restaurant. An while Ruda dreams of the prostitute Valerie, for whom he previously lacked the money, Vasek comes down with fever and Ruda tires to leave him behind. But Vasek manages to catch him up and they continue their flight together. In a wood they attack a seamstress but a group of Girl Scouts chase them off. At the harvest feast in a small village the boys buy liquor. They drink in a shanty for railway workers and Ruda, drunk, shoots to death another man: it is the civil guard Marjanka, who has been pursuing them. Yet now the circle of their pursuers is tightening around the boys. The following day the story comes to and end. Ruda is killed by the manhunters and Vasek takes his own life with Ruda's pistol...

The trivial case of poaching has been transformed into a suggestive ballad. The exciting plot benefits from fantastical photography and from a wise but severe humanism wich refuses to allow evil to go unpunished.