The Ear, made twenty years ago and refused distribution, was last year's Czechoslovakian entry at Cannes. The film is a chamber piece for two paranoid people ("a bugged version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" --Julian Petley, Sight and Sound). Radoslav Brzobohaty, who was so marvelous as the Everyman-farmer Franticek in All My Good Countryman, portrays Ludvik, a high-level government functionary. Returning home from an official reception, where he has learned that his superiors have been arrested, Ludvik and his wife Anna (Jirina Bohdalova) find their door open, their electricity cut off. The "ear" must be hidden somewhere. The agony and tension of preparing for Ludvik's imminent arrest precipitates a night of emotional searching, quarreling, bonding. Oldrich Cerny notes that this nightmarish suspense film acknowledges the excruciating effect on private lives of omnipresent power, "symbolized in the Communist slogan, 'Trust, but check!'" The script was co-authored by the prominent writer Jan Prochazka.