Venice Film Festival 1941

The White Plague, a leprosy-like disease, ravages the world during a war. Based on a play by Karel Čapek.

The doomed love of a city girl caught in the vise of poverty is detailed in Vavra’s fluid, romantic work, one of the most elegant creations of the Czech Modernist era... The film lingers over its characters’ habitats and haunts, finding psychological truths in what each owns or desires, and countering every Hollywood-ready scene of gleaming restaurants and dazzling penthouses with realist moments of employment lines and crammed flats. Vavra’s classical camerawork and aura of romantic defeatism give Virginity a force comparable to the master of this genre, Hollywood’s Frank Borzage. (BAM/PFA)

Vlasta Burian appears in a town of Czarist Russia impersonating an Inspector General, and he is entertained lavishly by the local political-hacks and peasants seeking his favor for whatever they are advocating or need fixed. Burain is involved in a series of comical situations as he takes everything he can gets his hands on while the peasants, who must plead for the betterment of their conditions, are left on the outside-looking-in. He makes his escape just as the real Inspector General is set to appear, but those-in-need will be no better off when the real McCoy shows up then they were with Burian.

Karla, a bar dancer, shoots her lover Mayer during a break-up. She hides from the police in pianist Pavel Ryant's apartment and promises to return when she leaves. The next day, however, Karla is arrested and convicted. In the penitentiary she meets the warden, Angelika, a nun who is very much like her. She begs Angelika to lend her clothes for a few days and leaves the prison as a nun.