Three men of different ages meet and socialize at a ski resort. Each is a misfit of some kind -- a physician with no money, a very wealthy man who has no privacy because his name is always recognized and strangers ask for money, a man who's lost the love of his life and sees no future. The snow, beautiful and eternal, provide a landscape of loss in which these three wander until each rediscovers his best self in the others.
This 1936 movie was made in Czechoslovakia. By this time the author of the book upon which it is based, Eric Kaestner, had become suspect in his native Germany. Kaestner later became famous in the U.S. because of the movie "The Parent Trap" which was based on his story, "Die Doppelte Lottchen," and because his "Emil und die Detective" was acknowledged as generating a sub-genre of child detective stories here, in both print and film. Kaestner was interrogated several times by Nazi authorities, 1936-1945, and his books were publicly denounced as being "antagonistic to the German spirit." He was never imprisoned, only marginalized as a creative artist. He was likewise spurned by politicians during the Adenauer regime, from 1949 into the 1960s. Adenauer may have still been miffed by Kaestner's well-known dismissal of the integrity of the Weimar Republic, in which he (Adenauer) served: "A democratically-elected government funded by capitalist cash boxes, and defended by an army composed of displaced aristocrats commanding the unemployable and outcast."
The three men in the story, and film, embody the unemployable and outcast. Despite their sense of persecution they do not submit to isolation with good grace -- each demonstrates a capacity for creativity. Their relationship is based on good humor and keen observation of their surroundings. The characters speak in Czech, but German subtitles were added in some markets.
