Jiří Weiss

Wandering through the forest, a woodcutter finds a golden fern whose seed turns into a beautiful woman - they fall in love. After getting drunk in a village feast, he gets to sign up to the army. The fairy gives him a shirt to wear and asks him to swear he will never abandon it. At the war front, he falls in love with the the colonel's daughter and will have to perform various feats to get her attention.

Pavel, a young student living in Prague in 1942, hides a Jewish girl in his apartment building's attic. Amidst the brutality of the occupying German army, love blossoms between the two. He is her only link to the outside world. Then the two are discovered by Pavel's mother, who forces the residents of the apartment building to decide whether Hana can remain.

An orphaned young woman named Jana moves into the household of Robert and his older, possessive wife, Klára. While Klára maintains a strict and manipulative control over the home, a mutual attraction develops between Robert and Jana. The three characters continue to live together as their domestic tensions increase.

During his work assignment in Tamani Kingdom, Czech worker Lojza saves a local man from dying in the desert. Two years later, it turns out the saved man was also the Taman king; and he has decided to name Lojza, a communist, his royal heir.

In a Prague shop, an assistant has been carrying on an affair with the dishonest, married manager. An emotionally repressed auditor with domestic problems of his own uncovers serious stock discrepancies. A test of loyalties and a questioning of values concludes in tragedy.

The year is 1941 and the German Nazis rule Bohemia with a free hand. Engineer Otakar Racek is an extremely cautious man who tries to avoid problems at all costs. While some of his colleagues are being arrested by the Gestapo, he receives an offer to become the director of a new department. When he refuses to help the wife of an arrested resistance fighter, his wife Vlasta is shaken. However, she loves him, to the point of even resigning herself to the hatred of Otakar's wealthy mother. One day, Vlasta lets her old acquaintance Ondřej Rýdl, who is on the run from the Gestapo, stay at her house for a few days. The wife passes him off to her husband as a distant relative. However, Otakar succumbs to jealousy and, on his mother's advice, hires a private detective to follow Vlasta. However, the detective is also a Gestapo informant and receives a hefty reward for every arrested resistance fighter...

The leader of the emerging organized labor movement in the 1880s, Ladislav Zápotocký-Budečský, is exiled to his native village, where he works as a tailor and continues to raise social awareness among members of the working class.

The protagonist (Rudolf Hrusinsky) is a dull, fat, shy government clerk indulging in voyuerism and ego fantasies. In love with another clerk (Kveta Fiolova), he is urged on in his pursuit by a commiserate executive. The story is told in a flashback sequence as the cuckolded Hrusinsky attempts suicide by gassing himself in his bathtub. The "Murder" of the title is not a murder as such, rather the murder that Hrusinsky remembers planning upon discovering his wife's unfaithfulness with his supposed friend and advisor. Both plots failing in his mind, he loses himself in fantastic reveries of his funeral and of hypocritical mourners. ' Deciding (perhaps) that this is not the way out either, he gives up the attempt and imagines a life of reconciliation and eventual affluence.