The Shop on Main Street

During World War II, a mild-mannered Slovak carpenter Anton "Tóno" Brtko is offered ownership of the sewing notions i.e. haberdasher store of an old, near-deaf Jewish woman, Rozália Lautmannová, as an Aryanization regulation is enacted. As Brtko attempts to explain to Lautmannová, who is oblivious to the world outside and generally confused, that he is now her supervisor and the owner of the store, Imrich Kuchár, a Slovak opponent of Aryanization, informs Brtko that the business is unprofitable and Lautmannová relies on donations. The Jewish community then offers to pay Brtko a salary if he nevertheless stays in charge, to prevent it being given to a new, possibly ruthless Aryanizer. He accepts and lets Lautmannová believe he is her nephew who has come to help.

Their relationship grows until the authorities round up the Jews for transport. Brtko is conflicted as to whether he should turn in or hide Lautmannová. Drinking steadily, he loses his nerve and attempts to cajole and then force her to join the Jewish prisoners in the street, but then stops his attempts when he sees them being taken away. When Lautmannová becomes aware of the pogrom, she panics and, in attempting to silence her, Brtko pushes her into a closet. She falls, breaking her neck, and dies. Devastated, Brtko hangs himself. The movie ends with a dream sequence with the now deceased Lautmannová and Brtko running and dancing through the town square together.

The screenplay had a bilingual Czech−Slovak history. The screenwriter Ladislav Grosman (1921–1981) was born and grew up in Slovakia. Grosman published his precursor to the screenplay, the short story "The Trap" ("Past"), in Czech in 1962.[8] Only three of its themes were used in the film. He subsequently reworked and expanded it, still in Czech, as a literary-narrative screenplay published in 1964 under the title "The Shop on Main Street" (Obchod na korze),[9] which already contained the film's story, although not in the usual (American) screenplay format.[10] He then reworked it into a shooting script with Slovak dialogues in cooperation with the film's designated directors Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos. The only other language in the film is Yiddish (sometimes misidentified as German) limited to several lines that Mrs. Lautmannová mutters to herself. Her Hebrew reading from the siddur is indistinct.

The score was composed by Zdenek Liska and it incorporates traditional brass band style music that would have been common in Czechoslovakia during the 1940s. The soundtrack was released on record in the US. It was the first Czech movie soundtrack to be released on a record in the US.[11]

The Shop on Main Street was filmed on location at the town of Sabinov in north-eastern Slovakia with numerous local extras whose voices bring in hints of the eastern regional variety of Slovak. Ida Kamińska's Polish accent is employed to the same effect.

• List of submissions to the 38th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
• List of Czechoslovak submissions for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film
• List of films featuring the deaf and hard of hearing
• List of Czech Academy Award winners and nominees
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• Szabó, Miloslav (2015). "Ein ‚antislowakischer' Oscar-Film?". S: I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation. (in German). 2 (1): 102–108. ISSN 2408-9192.

• Steven Banovac, "Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos: The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze) 1965."
• The Shop on Main Street at IMDb
• The Shop on Main Street at the TCM Movie Database
• The Shop on Main Street at AllMovie
• The Shop on Main Street: Not the Six Million but the One an essay by Ján Kadár at the Criterion Collection
• The Shop on Main Street on Criterion Channel