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The online film magazine Combustible Celluloid offers new movie reviews, DVD reviews, film reviews, actor interviews, actress interviews, director interviews, film books and all things cinema related for the thoughtful and passionate. Online for ten years! Over 3000 reviews!

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The Fifth Horseman Is Fear (1964)

Rating: 3 Stars (out of 4)

'Horseman' Feathers

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy The Fifth Horseman Is Fear on DVD

Czech director Zbynek Brynych's The Fifth Horseman Is Fear opens strikingly, with a beautiful, widescreen, black-and-white frame capturing images of World War II, eerie, beautiful and devastating. Our hero (Miroslav Machácek) is a Jewish doctor forbidden to practice medicine and forced instead to work as a clerk in a warehouse. The good doctor has resigned himself to his fate, and hardly even questions it. But everything changes when one of his neighbors comes to him with a gunshot wound (sustained in the resistance). The doctor reluctantly treats it, but lacks the final touch: morphine to dull the pain. He sets out on an almost-surreal journey across Prague in search of morphine for a man he doesn't even know. The film's final half-hour deals with the repercussions of the doctor's actions and it never ceases its inventive camerawork and its striking imagery. Nevertheless I found it difficult to follow. The subtitles on the critic's screener disc I watched often seemed not to match up with the dialogue, and there were long, talky stretches with no subtitles at all. I can't fault the film itself for these lapses (and it's possible the final product will have been improved) so I'm recommending it anyway, with reservations.

DVD Details: Facets released the 2006 DVD with a video introduction by film historian Andrew Horton and liner notes.

Starring: Miroslav Machacek, Olga Scheinpflugova, Jiri Adamira, Illia Prachar, Josef Vinklar, Zdenka Prochazkova, Slavka Budinova, Jiri Virtala
Written by: Zbynek Brynych
Directed by: Zbynek Brynych
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Language: Czech with English subtitles
Running Time: 95 minutes
Date: August 22, 2006