"The dramaturgist Alexander Kliment said of the screenplay that if it is successful it would appeal to heretics of all kinds" Josef Skvorecky said of his story and screenplay End of a Priest. Evald Schorm brought it to the screen as a kind of grotesque fairytale, with elements of surrealism à la a modern-day Hieronymus Bosch. The story is a tragifarce about a hangdog church sexton (Vlastimil Brodsky) who masquerades successfully as a priest, drawing the affection and affiliation of an entire town away from its pompous Communist schoolmaster. Less a dialogue between Marxism and Christianity than a portrait of village life choked to death by ideology, the film holds a magnifying glass to the human bizarreness that results. Evald Schorm is described by M. and A. Liehm as "one of the most controversial directors, an uncompromising moralist in the best sense of the word." The film was among those whose production was delayed until all censorship was withdrawn-which is to say, until the Prague Spring, which meant its presence was shortlived indeed. Subsequently it gained the distinction of being "Banned Forever."