The White Lady (An American's Guide to Czech Movies) (Patreon)

Grandma Stazi’s rural hometown of Blatná, about 50 miles southwest of Prague, has stood for at least 800 years. The town sits on marshlands, and is best known for its water castle, which remains open to tourists. It seems like Blatná has changed slowly too. Grandma Stazi was baptized in the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, which stands in the town square to this day. Next to it is the World War Memorial, a statue honoring the Czechoslovak Legion, which served the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I. The statue specifically highlights the legion’s contributions in 1917’s Battle of Zboriv, where it helped the Russians win a rare victory on the Eastern Front. Grandma Stazi and her siblings in Cleveland helped pay for the statue in 1928, long after they left Blatná.

Nearly four decades and another world war later, Blatná starred in The White Lady, a low-budget gothic comedy about a legendary ghost from a Bohemian castle who disrupts local Communist authorities by making an old villager’s faucet run properly. It’s the sort of movie that got banned in the years of Soviet Normalization, which checks out since it has the authorities panicking about any local infrastructure working without prior authorization. It’s silly and fun — hardly a masterpiece of the era, but has a similar charm to a B-list Richard Lester comedy.

Writer Karel Michal was a respected writer of the Prague Underground era, who like Miloš Forman or Milan Kundera eventually fled Czechoslovakia. He shows an understanding of how Czech culture worked — the White Lady is a classic figure in Czech folklore. The authorities simultaneously reject ghosts as bourgeois superstition and try to co-opt the story of the White Lady for their own ends (“even a legend can have the characteristics of progress”). Rudolf Hrušinský, later the star of The Cremator, owns the movie as a tight-assed preening bureaucrat who tries and fails to destroy the White Lady’s image by making her a character in a play with collapsing sets.

The most remarkable part really is the setting. Blatná doesn’t appear to have changed much. The castle is a central location in the movie. So is Grandma Stazi’s church. And the memorial statue even appears in one shot. In the end, it’s gothic specters and mysterious old towns that defeat the authorities. A banal, bureaucratic world view simply can’t account for strange old hamlets.