BÍLÁ NEMOC
T it : La peste bianca. T int : Skeleton on Horseback Sog : dal dramma omonimo di Karel Čapek Scen : Hugo Haas F : Otto Heller M : Antonín Zelenka, Fannie Hurst Scgf : Štěpán Kopecký Mus : Jan Branberger Int : Hugo Haas (il dottor Galén), Bedrich Karen (il professor Sigelius), Zdeněk Štěpánek (il maresciallo), Vaclav Vydra (il barone Krog), Frantisek Smolík (il cittadino), Helena Frydlova (la moglie del cittadino), Ladislav Bohac (il glio di Krog), Karla Olicová (la glia del maresciallo), Jaroslav Prucha (il dottor Martin) Prod : Hugo Haas per Moldavia Film Pri pro : 21 dicembre 1937 35mm D : 108’ Bn
Film Notes
Based on the contemporary drama by Karel Capek, and directed by the actor Hugo Haas, this film represents that time and its ideals, set in an imaginary country ruled by a war hungry dictator where a mysterious ‘white leprosy’ spreads. Only a scientist is able to create a cure to combat the epidemic, but he has strongly pacifist principles and he gives the dictator a condition: stop the war. Rather than helping him in his quest for peace, the people turn against the wise man; they kill him and disfigure his corpse.
Haas’s film was one “whose intentions went beyond each boundary of the cinematographic spectacle… A courageous work which would not have been fully appreciated when it first appeared on screen” (René Jeanne, Charles Ford, Histoire encyclopédique du cinéma, S.E.D.E., Paris 1953). His disconsolate conclusions reflected the downhearted mood of Capek,
who on the evening of Christmas Day 1938, while his country was in its last months of independence, died of a broken heart. The stage production of Skeleton on Horseback at the National Theatre had provoked attacks from the Berlin press, but Haas’s film gave rise to a German diplomatic intervention in the government in Prague, which resulted in the film being banned.
Ernesto G. Laura, Storia del cinema ceco- slovacco, in Il lm cecoslovacco, Edizioni dell’Ateneo, Roma 1960