The Shop on Main Street (1965, Ján Kadár & Elmar Klos) (Patreon)

64/100

Second viewing, last seen 2000. I consider Schindler's List the greater achievement by far, but this film's sobering pre-emptive counterpoint—amounting to, in essence, "I should have saved fewer!"—deserves to be acknowledged in the same or at least an adjacent breath. Somewhere in between Hitler's willing executioners and Resistance heroes, Shop acknowledges, were ordinary people who tried to do the right thing so long as that entailed no significant risk to their own safety; while it's chilling to watch Brtko abandon his principles (such as they are—important to note that he never lodges any objection to profiting from anti-Semitic dictates) at the first sign of real danger, and we'd all prefer to believe that we'd never do such a thing ourselves, The Shop on Main Street makes a dispiritingly persuasive case that the average decent citizen isn't quite so courageous. Not sure why Ida Kamińska got all the plaudits at the time (even being Oscar-nominated for Best Actress!), as she's mostly just cutesy-oblivious until the final reel, playing a character whose deafness/incomprehension is a tad too strategic for my taste. Jozef Kroner, on the other hand, really burrows into Brtko's laissez-faire mediocrity—it's a beautifully tentative, wary performance, rooted in a tug of war between compassion and fear that's plainly visible without being telegraphed. Could have done without the fantasy sequences (though overexposing them was an effective formal choice), and what happens in the last few minutes feels programmatic. But this is still among the more quietly devastating Holocaust dramas, admirably focused on commonplace human weakness that's not easy "dismissed" (in terms of viewer identification) as pure evil.