My Sunday morning ritual involves slowly moving from bed to my living room recliner. I power up the TV and check the DVR for the overnight taping of Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley. Host and Czar of Noir Eddie Muller is the only voice in the house at this time. I don’t care how sunny it is outside because I’m eager for a few hours in the shadows. I appreciate when Eddie pulls out a foreign film from this era that has the same feel as the Noir made in Hollywood at RKO. There are people who complain about reading subtitles so early in the morning. Not me. It’s good to discover new old titles instead of rewatching the warhorses endlessly. When I worked at the NC School of the Arts Film Archive, I’d help Ray Regis put together his film noir class. He was a major collector of 35mm Noir films. (Don’t ask me how he got them). While we talked a lot about the genre, actors and directors: I never heard him mention Krakatit. From my minimal research, this is a post-World War II Czechoslovakian film that has yet to play on Noir Alley yet. It deserves the honor.
Prokop (The Fabulous Baron Munchausen‘s Karel Hoger) in a hospital surgery on a stretcher. He’s barely awake, has burned hands and the doctor has no clue who he is. While taking oxygen, we slip inside Prokop’s dream. He’s wandering the street in a state of confusion. He runs into an old school pal Jiri Tomes (Miroslav Homola). He blathers to Jiri about this new explosion he created called Krakatit. Jiri seems to be looking out for his old friend and takes him back to Prokop’s house and tuck him into bed. However Jiri keeps asking him about the new explosive. Prokop is slipping into a dream that his old chemistry professor is asking about it in his classroom. He tells him everything. Later when Prokop has recovered, he rudely discovers Prokop has sold the secret of Krakatit to a military weapons corporation. He’s forced into working for the company to perfect the technique. Is there any hope for Prokop to stop his creation from destroying the world?
Krakatit is a multitude of films in one. There’s a science fiction angle with the discovery of this new destructive force being invented. There’s surrealism with how we get into to the dreams of Prokop. His old classroom features cardboard cut outs of the other students going up to the rafters. In one scene he enters a room, looks out a window and sees himself enter a cabin. Everything has a fierce noir feel with the shadows and uncertainty in the black and white images. The destructive bomb angle feels like Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and Irving Lerner’s City of Fear. Except neither of those films had come out. Krakatit drinks from the source water that inspired the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel and David Lynch. While the movie was made behind the Iron Curtain in 1948, Krakatit did get imported to America in 1951. I’m not sure how many theaters it played outside of New York City since it ran with only English subtitles. Ray Regis never mentioned the movie or assigned me to track down a copy on VHS. It feels like Krakatit didn’t quite have the cult impact it deserves. Although this new and beautiful 4K UHD should gain plenty of new fans who can enjoy it as an international Film Noir and more. Only a shame I can’t send Ray a copy.
The movie is adapted from the novel with the same name by Karel Čapek. In a previous book, he invented the term robot. During my early computer programming class, we had to create a “program” in basic that involved Karel The Robot (which was a keyboard arrow). I’m thankful I didn’t have to decipher Prokop’s dream in Pascal or Fortran.
If you are the type of person who enjoys when Noir Alley goes international, I highly recommend this 4K UHD. The same goes for fans of David Lynch movies. Don’t let Krakatit be a mystery to you.
The Video is 1.33:1 full frame. The black and white restored transfer shimmers on the HDTV screen. The Audio is Czech DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono. It sounds clean so you can absorb all the noises from this dream. The movie is subtitled in English.
Blu-ray with the movie and bonus features
Commentary Track by Irena Kovarova and Peter Hames give background on the film and what was having in Czech cinema at the time Krakatit was released. They point out how Otakar Vávra made 50 films from the start of the sound era to the ’90s. He lived to be 100 and no major impact in the US. Hames feels the director had no clue about the Film Noir being made in Hollywood. Kovarova sense he might have known about a few of the titles. Besides directing, he was booking films to play in Prague through a distributor in France.
Krakatit: Moral Vertigo in the Nuclear Age (18:46) is a visual essay from film historian Clayton Dillard. He gets into how the film bills itself as a fever dream. And the movie feels like a dream in its unreality of scenes. He shows how the film deals with the rise of communists in the country and the threat of nuclear annihilation after World War II. By the time the movie was released, the communist coup had just happened.
Interview with Tereza Frodlova (48:37) is Zoom call conducted by Dennis Bartok of Deaf Crocodile She is an archivist and head restoration expert at the National Film Archive in Prague. She talks about restoring films when the director and cinematographer have died so you can’t reference what they want. They used the original negative on nitrate stock for the digitation. She gets into the restrictions of using nitrate film since it does blow up. I talked about nitrate film in the review of Lost Emulsion. Bartok explains why Deaf Crocodile went with a 4K UHD release (which is so worth it). There is talk of film collectors in the region.
Dear Crocodile presents Krakatit. Directed by Otakar Vávra. Screenplay by Otakar Vávra & Jaroslav Vávra. Starring Karel Höger, Florence Marly, Eduard Linkers, Jiří Plachý, Nataša Tanská, František Smolík & Miroslav Homola. Running Time: 102 minutes. Rating: Unrated. Release Date: May 12, 2026.
