In the brief cold war moment before the Soviet Union brutally crushed its vitality in the crackdown after the “Prague Spring,” the Czech cinema exemplified the country’s sly, humane rebelliousness to the world. And Menzel’s film, about a feckless young crossing guard at a sleepy railroad station who becomes an unlikely (and tragic) hero of the resistance to German occupation was its sweetly funny, curiously moving masterpiece. TIME thought Menzel kept his mood-shifting movie “on the track all the way.” Indeed, he did.
