One of the first Czech films to deal with the "cult of personality," Cassandra Cat is an allegorical fantasy about a bespectacled cat whose steady gaze makes everyone show his true colors-literally. Small-town life cannot hold up under the disrupting stare of the magic cat, in whose presence habitual liars toeing the Party line turn violet, thieves grey, adulterers yellow. Along with an inventive use of color, the film integrates elements of ballet and mime into the narrative. "Stylized to the extreme...it not only opened a Pandora's Box of taboo subject matter, it also broke the lock on the chest that for so many years had confined visual fantasy" (Liehm and Liehm, The Most Important Art). Like other works of the Czech New Wave, Cassandra Cat was a collaborative effort between artists, including the talented cameraman Jaroslav Kucera (Daisies, see September 1), the stage comic and author Jan Werich, who plays the cat's magician owner, and the dour-faced Vlastimil Brodsky (End of a Priest) as a beleaguered schoolteacher. Vojtech Jasny was a leading member of the "first generation" of postwar Czechoslovak filmmakers; his works bracket the New Wave, Cassandra Cat in 1963 being the first outright assertion that, from then on, filmmakers would call things by their right names, and his 1968 masterpiece All My Good Countrymen seeing the era of outspoken cinema come to a close. The film was banned since the demise of the Prague Spring and only recently taken out of the censors' vaults.