A Night at Karlstein

Zdeněk Podskalský’s 1974 Czechoslovak musical comedy is set in the fourteenth century. No woman may enter Karlštejn Castle; the king’s order is unambiguous. Two women in love manage to get in anyway, in disguise, and to spend a night there. The setup comes from a stage play and the film proceeds through songs, with the comedy arising less from the prohibition than from the number of ways everyone finds around it. Vlastimil Brodský, Jana Brejchová and Miloš Kopecký are among the familiar faces of the period in it. It became one of those films Czechoslovak television went on repeating for years. At eighty-three minutes the whole thing is built on a single night inside the castle.