This marvelous black comedy by Jiri Menzel, set in Czechoslovakia before, during and after the World War II, has been adapted, as was Menzel's 1967 Oscar-winning masterpiece "Closely Watched Trains", from a novel by Bohumil Hrabal. There are many similarities between both films, starting with a naive young protagonist in the tradition of Good Soldier Švejk, but while ''Closely Watched Trains'' (Menzel's film debut) was a modest, and largely apolitical work (despite its World War II setting), ''I Served The King Of England'' is an ambitious, epic saga that spans almost a quarter of the century of the Czech history (from circa 1935 to circa 1960) and deals with extremely controversial themes in a fabulously ironic and comedic way. In a way, ''I Served The King Of England'' is a bit like a Czech ''Forrest Gump", except that this Forrest Gump is a Nazi collaborator and war profiteer, but despite all that, he still remains an immensely likeable fellow. It wasn't his fault, after all, that he fell in love with a poor German girl (Julia Jentsch), molested by brutish Czech thugs during the Sudetenland crisis in 1938. And it wasn't his fault that his sexy new girlfriend turned out to be a fervent Nazi fanatic. Our Czech Forrest Gump could hardly be blamed for choosing the losing side in World War II and suffering the consequences afterwards (although the exact reason he suffers those consequences is a deliciously ironic twist that won't be revealed here, but which perfectly sums up the absurd conundrum in which Eastern Europe has found itself in the late 1940’s). Eddie Cockrell praises the film in Variety as "a unique mixture of self-deprecating dark humour and personal tragedy that has been the Czech cinema's stock-in-trade since their celebrated 1960s New Wave (...) And pic's tone is nothing if not audacious, wringing laughs from subjects that include a Nazi human breeding centre. (…) There's nothing lecherous about the parade of beautiful women on view, all of whom are photographed as lovingly as the beer". It is all true, except for the last sentence - the film is actually quite lecherous, sexy and perverse.
