Excellent, smart action film.

Dreadfully Boring

The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

It is very confusing! This movie was finished in 1970. To put 1990 it is so confusing. I thought it was another movie when looking for it just because of that date.

Reading up about Czech New Wave titles (CNW),I was shocked to find out about a CNW movie that was filmed in 1970,but banned from being seen by the Soviet Union until 1989!,which led to me deciding that it was time to listen in on the movie.The plot:Returning home after partying with their fellow comrades,husband and wife Ludvík and Anna notice that their house has been broken into.Rushing in, Ludvík & Anna find that their spare keys have been taken,and that their house is the only one on the street without power.Looking outside their window,Anna and Ludvík notice mysterious men in long coats standing in the shadows,and a postal van parked nearby.Trying to rise to the top in the Communist Pary,Anna and Ludvík begin to fear that the strangers outside are party members secretly listening in.View on the film:Skipping over the allegorical lines usually taken (understandably) by Cold War Czech movies,the screenplay by co-writer/(along with Jan Procházka & Ladislav Winkelhöfer) strikes the occupying Soviet's with a merciless fury.Taking place over one night,the writers make the party that the couple attend one that is filled with Film Noir slime balls,who have their eyes locked on finding any flaws which can keep a competitor in their place.Coming back from the party,the writers soak Anna and Ludvik slippery in paranoia (where even Stalin gets named!) ,by making their fears over being spied on open up the raw wounds that have covered their marriage over the years.Shooting down the sparks from the party,director Kachyna & cinematographer Josef Illík scan the guests with ultra-stylish Film Noir first person tracking shots,which along with exposing the lies falling from the fellow Party members,also allows the viewer to get an earful of Ludvik's ruthless views on his fellow Communist Party members.Backed by an icy score from Svatopluk Havelka, Kachyna gives Ludvik & Anna's house a rustic CNW naturalism,where dusty floors and mouldy walls match the decay of their inhibitions. Closing the couple off in the house, Kachyna digs them in with a rich Film Noir atmosphere,thanks to elegant panning shots and eye-catching flickers from candle lights cast a mood of impending dread over the house.Walking round the house with busted nerves, Jiřina Bohdalová, (who the real Soviet/Czech secret police the StB tried to blackmail)gives an intense performance as Anna,who Bohdalová paints with a light shade of love for Ludvik,with an overwhelming agony over trying to stop Ludvik sinking into the Film Noir darkness.Trying to charm everyone at the party, Radoslav Brzobohatý gives an excellent performance as Ludvik,whose Film Noir loner loyalty over the Party Brzobohatý tears up with a stern brutality,as Ludvik discovers the hidden ear of his Party.

Husband and wife stagger tired and tipsy through their house at night holding candelabras. Something's not quite right, a basement door open ajar, keys where they shouldn't be, electricity and phone are out of order. A little earlier the movie opens with the couple back at their house after a 'party' gala. They fight and bicker on the pavement out of the car, then inside the house, like we're behind a closed door hearing echoes of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Flashbacks to the party earlier that night in subjective POV shots take us through a roomful of people dressed in suits holding up cocktail glasses ready to toast prominent Party figures, faces peering intently into the camera, huddling together to hide conspiratorial whispers or perhaps simple idle gossip. When the husband goes to the bathroom to freshen up, an old woman shows up to offer him a towel; in doing so, she disappears in the background and stays there, as though placed there to observe.This is a great movie about paranoia, the "fear" of being watched and discussed, and it's a half good movie when it stops being about paranoia, because at some point we know the couple is being monitored by the Party and have had to live with bugs in their living room for years. In the famous finale of The Conversation, a maddened Gene Hackman tears through his apartment looking for bugs. His nightmare echoes through the years of cinema because it's a nightmare left incomplete, damnation through eternity. Here things become clear in the final act.This is ambiguous psychodrama for as long as it suits the movie, then it becomes the political indictment it planned to be. It's stunning to me that a movie like this was allowed to be made in the Eastern Bloc of the 1970's. Usually filmmakers working in Soviet Union satellite republics spoke of Soviet tyranny indirectly. They used the Nazis to tell us about living through the oppression of a totalitarian regime. Here comrade Stalin is mentioned by name. As such, this is a brave movie that attacks contemporary things of a contemporary society.The dimensions of this political thriller are most chilling for me in a particular scene: the husband asks the wife to remember earlier at the party if one particular guest was friendly to her and addressed her by her first name. He reasons that if he did so, if he recognized her in public in a friendly manner, that the husband is not under political scrutiny by his higher-ups, if that were the case everyone would keep their distance from even the wife. Social life in The Ear is not leisure time or exchange of ideas, it's an arena of suspicion and conspiracy, a chess game of ritualized behavior and expected moves.Back home, behind closed doors, The Ear never sleeps. Under its scrutiny, married life becomes the forum of vented anger and frustration. As the married couple stagger through their household in the dark holding candelabras as though exploring the catacomb of a Gothic horror movie, their exchanges become increasingly unpleasant and hostile. There's one very grueling scene in the bathroom where the wife berates her husband for the choices of a lifetime. Yet in the important moments of life and death, when a man is about to take his own life or when they're coming to get him, they're close together in defiance of everything.

I don't recall what circumstances led me to Karel Kachyna's Ucho; the movie is practically unknown. But I'm glad I watched it. I'm a fan of political cinema and think it's refreshing to see a movie condemning the Soviet Union.Ucho has a simple, almost theatrical, plot: after a party, a couple return home and begin suspecting that people were at their home while they were gone. This suspicion, aggravated by the fact the husband is a Party officer and that he spent all night receiving innuendos about a purge within the Party that already cost the careers (and lives?) of several friends, explodes into a series of recrimination between himself and his tipsy wife about their private life.The movie shows how easily the state could affect the private life in the Soviet Union, how people were on edge and constantly paranoid and why they had good motives to be paranoid. In a scene that certainly inspired Francis Ford Coppola in The Conversation, the couple goes around the house looking for bugs in every room. In The Conversation Harry Caul doesn't find any; in Ucho there's one in every room, so obscenely obvious it's like the secret police doesn't even care if the couple knows their existence. After all, what could they do about it? Complain to the police? This movie is theatrical because it's concentrated inside a house, in spite of some well-timed flashbacks to the party. But it's also theatrical because of its use of dialogue. This is one of those movies, like Sleuth, like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where acting coupled with fierce, witty dialogue carries the narrative along.It's fascinating to see Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohatý) and Anna (Jirina Bohdalová) torn each other apart in petty accusations, with the fear of arrest looming over their heads. A movie like this would need two good performances to work, and the actors, although they're not famous, are up to the task and provide the movie's emotional core.Karel Kachyna and screenwriter Jan Procházka deserve praise for this study of life in the Soviet Union.