Noční jazdci (Night Riders). 1981. Czechoslovakia. Directed by Martin Hollý. Screenplay by Marta Kadlečíková, Vít Olmer, Tibor Vichta. With Radoslav Brzobohatý, Michal Dočolomanský, Soňa Valentová. 35mm, courtesy Slovenský filmový ústav. In Slovak, Czech; English subtitles. 87 min.
One of the great border Westerns, this 1981 coproduction between the Czech Barrandov and Slovak Koliba studios concerns the frontiers not of the American West, but of the newly formed Czechoslovak state in 1920, where an archaic world first comes into contact with the laws and regulations of a modern nation. A customs officer freshly posted from Prague (Radoslav Brzobohatý) squares off against a horse smuggler (Michal Dočolomanský), who is teaching his impoverished neighbors English and plotting their emigration to America. Martin Hollý stages the standoff between the two men, each representing a distinct worldview, among the gorges and peaks of the Slovak Tatra Mountains with a Sam Peckinpah–like vividness, rendering it alternately as symbolic drama and pungent human spectacle, a theater of faces, hands, and forearms that builds to a despairing, bleakly ironic climax.