The Shop on Main Street is a masterpiece of understatement, a “tragicomedy” of two people that develops into a powerful anti-fascist statements. In a sleepy Slovak town in 1942, a simple carpenter, Tono, down on his luck, is offered a job that will make him “somebody”: he is to be the “aryan controller” of a Jewish-owned button shop on Main Street. He accepts the position at the prodding of his upwardly mobile wife, who is certain that a fortune lies hidden amid the dusty shelves of the tiny shop. What Tono finds instead is the shop's elderly proprietor, Rosalie Lautmann, who is nearly deaf, bankrupt and seemingly unaware of the hazards of the German Occupation. She assumes that Tono has come to help out, and he goes along with the charade until, in the end, he is forced to choose between his own safety and that of a kindly and profoundly naive old lady. The first film from Eastern Europe to win an Academy Award, The Shop on Main Street is graced by a memorable performance by Ida Kaminska as Rosalie. Directors Kadar and Klos point out that their parable of human conscience “could be transported to a Negro woman in Alabama or a woman awaiting deportation to Siberia in Stalinist Russia, but why should we go outside our own country?” (Kadar's first American film in 1970 was The Angel Levine, about the tensions between Jews and Blacks in New York City.)