Vyšší princip

Higher Principle is a Czech drama film based on the eponymous short story from the book Silent Barricade written by Jan Drda in 1946. The movie was released in 1960 and was temporarily banned in West Germany as the "anti-German film". Plot The story takes place in the town of Kostelec in 1942, during the Nazi occupation, shortly after Czech and Slovak resistance fighters assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, the Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia, precipitating a vengeful Nazi crackdown. When the movie opens, the owner of the town bookstore is placing a comical maquette in his shop window, featuring photos of students who are soon to graduate from the local high school as well as a photo of their elderly Latin teacher, Professor Málek (played by František Smolík), as he points to the words "Higher Principle," the nickname that the students have given him on account of his frequent quotation of Seneca's moral precepts. A local Nazi official takes offense at the lightheartedness of the maquette, considering it out of keeping with official mourning for Heydrich, and orders it removed. Teachers at the high school and its director worry that the episode will get them in trouble with the local Gestapo, but the students don't take it seriously, and in fact, when one notices a photo of Heydrich in the newspaper that his open-faced sandwich came wrapped in, he and a friend ink a comical mustache and beard onto the portrait. A more cautious student quickly shoves the caricature into the schoolroom stove, but later we see a student named Zajíček, who is flunking most of his classes, washing soot off one of his hands. Zajíček's father, played by a young Rudolf Hrušinský, happens to be in a relationship with a secretary at the town's Gestapo headquarters, and his shoestore is going bankrupt, giving him a motive for collaboration.