Figure 1.-- This scene from "See You in Debver" shows a group of school children on an outing (1940s). Note the boys wearing peaked caps and one boy on the extreme left with his short trousers and brown long stockings.

Movie-loving cousins who grow up on the silent American Westerns that one of their parents owned and showed in a local Czech cinema in Prague. The family was in the film distribution business. For a while the stash of American Western films was successfully concealed from the communist authorities after the Soviet take-over at the end of World War II. Eventually the films were confiscated. This could have gone very bad for the family, but in Communist Czechoslovakia there were periods of Stlinisr suppression followed by relative relaxation. Ad any event, the two cousins began making their own homemade versions of Westerns, acting themselves and using friends, and showing these to very small semi-secret audiences. The Communists eventually confiscated the American western films, which is why the family started to make their own "Westerns" secretly in Czechoslovakia. Apparently the communists were not very interested in just home movies (recording home events like weddings and scenes of children playing), which are the basis for the footage of "Private Century". On the previous page we see the cousins as boys in the 1940s scrambling up onto the roof of a local building where they suspect a few of the original films are concealed. Note that the older boys wear knickers whereas the youngest boy, about 11 years old wears short trousers and long stockings. Another shot from the same episode shows a group of children of various ages on a school outing (figure 1). Note the boys wearing peaked caps and one boy on the extreme left with his short trousers and brown long stockings.

Created: 1:23 AM 10/6/2009
Last updated: 3:46 PM 10/6/2009