Higher Principle

In 1942, in a Czech town under Nazi occupation, people are being rounded up and shot on the thinnest of pretexts. Three schoolboys joke about a recently killed Reich official, and the Gestapo takes them out of class. When the school’s old teacher of classical languages is asked to condemn what they said, his answer gives the film its title: from the standpoint of a higher moral principle, killing a tyrant is not a crime. Jiří Krejčík adapted a Jan Drda story set in the reprisals that followed the Heydrich assassination, and behind it lies a real case, a Příbram schoolboy denounced in June 1942 for throwing away a magazine photograph of Hitler and executed alongside his father. František Smolík’s professor is usually called the best performance of his career, and the film won the international critics’ prize at Locarno in 1960.