Prince and Evening Star

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Movie
German title Prince and Evening Star
Original title Princ a Večernice
Country of production Czechoslovakia
original language Czech
Publishing year 1979
length 76 minutes
Age rating FSK without age restriction
Rod
Director Václav Vorlíček
script Jiří Brdečka
Božena Němcová
Karel Jaromír heirs
production Film studios Barrandov
music Svatopluk Havelka
camera Josef Illík
cut Miroslav Hájek
occupation

Prince and Evening Star (alternative title The Prince and the Evening Star , in the original Princ a Večernice ) is a Czech fairy tale film directed by Václav Vorlíček in 1978 based on the fairy tale O Měsíčníku, Slunečníku a Větrníku - roughly moon man, sun man and wind man - by Božena Němcová and details from Karel Jaromír Erben's fairy tale Princess Golden Hair was filmed. The Prince and the Evening Star was made in the Barrandov film studios . The film premiered in Czechoslovakia in October 1979; it was first broadcast on German television on December 31, 1980 under the title Prinz und Abendstern . The film is also known under the Hungarian title A herceg és a csillaglány .

action

Prince Velen and his three sisters lead a happy life in their father's castle. He worries: In his opinion, his children are far too immature; for Lenka, Elenka and Helenka it is time for husbands and Velen should finally learn to take on royal duties. When he goes hunting with his best friend and court jester, he leaves the prince to rule over his three sisters, who promptly demand that he not only make fun of them, but also find suitors for them. After some ridicule, Velen takes this task seriously and torments himself for a while with thought. He complains of his suffering to the evening star, who comes to him in the form of a beautiful princess and promises relief in return for a kiss. Shortly afterwards she stuns Velen with a spell; when he wakes up again, she is gone. For this, the wind man, the moon man and the sun man appear one after the other and each take one of his sisters with them as a bride. Velen is relieved at first.

But when his father comes home, he describes Velen as insane. Offended, the prince disappears and goes in search of his sisters. While trying to talk to Abendstern, with whom he has fallen in love, he gets to know the Cloud Man, who advises him to stay away from Abendstern, as he himself desires her as a bride. His father, however, is sorry for the rough treatment of the prince. On the advice of his friend, he is about to start looking for him and the princesses when the three girls appear with their husbands and assure him that they are fine.

Velen encounters an inn, where he loses all his possessions, including clothes, to a couple of deceitful nobles and the landlord, and has to work hard to get rid of debts he owes to the landlord after a drink. The three servants finally give him clothes and something to eat so that he can walk. In the mountains he clashes with a man and his two friends whom he initially helped and gave of his food, but who ultimately wanted to cheat him out of his share of their food.

Suddenly Velen finds himself in his own clothes on a meadow. Evening star greets him happily and welcomes him to the sky castle. The cloud man appears and wants to take Evening Star with him, but she refuses. Velen threatens the cloud man, but he only disappears when the prince's three brothers-in-law appear behind his back. They are gone so quickly that Velen did not notice their presence, and although he sees the sun, moon and wind meet in the sky with a violent thunderstorm, he believes he has driven the cloud man away himself. Abendstern hides the truth from him and the two marry. But at night Velen sneaks away from his bride, following a strange noise through the sky castle, and finds the shackled cloud man, who tells him about the help of his brothers-in-law. Velen feels challenged and accidentally frees the cloud man, who disappears and takes evening star with him.

Velen passes out again and wakes up in the desert. His brothers-in-law reprimand him for his behavior and give him a rather idiosyncratic description of the cloud man's castle, where Evenstar is held captive. Velen sets off and, once there, has three tasks, the last of which is the fight against the cloud man. One of his brothers-in-law is at his side for every task, and he can finally stab the adversary. Evening star stuns him again.

When Velen wakes up this time, he is in front of his home castle and his horse is back. The king calls him in and takes him to his sisters, who are happy to see them again. The three brothers-in-law tell him that they made him difficult on his journey in order to put him to the test and also to teach him. When Abendstern, who is also the sister of Windmann, Sonnenmann and Mondmann, reappears, everything comes to a happy end.

Fairy tale fabric

The fairy tale motif of the film The Prince and the Evening Star is closely related to the frequently narrated motif of the helpful animal-in-laws ( Aarne-Thompson-Index AT 552) - however, it does not match the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm . The film motif of the longed-for, which the lover has to find out from a lot of identical-looking girls, comes from Karel Jaromír Erben's fairy tale Princess Goldhaar - but this fairy tale has nothing in common with the fairy tales of the helpful stars.

criticism

“Imaginative fairy tale film by the specialist Vorlicek; based on an old Czech fairy tale, recorded in a picturesque Bohemian landscape. "

- Lexicon of international film

occupation

With the casting of the Evening Star with Libuše Šafránková , director Vorlíček fell back on a fairy tale actress who was extremely popular in the 1970s and early 1980s, who has embodied the ideal type of princess in Czechoslovak fairy tale films since her breakthrough in Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella .

Juraj Ďurdiak , the chosen one of the evening star, also played in the German DFF fairy tale film Beauty and the Beast .

With Vladimír Menšík as king, he appears in Germany through many comedic roles in children's films by well-known actors - one might think, for example, E.g. to family man Josef Urban in Pan Tau or the fairy tale uncle in Die Märchenbraut .

A popular actor, Radoslav Brzobohatý , who became known to the German television audience primarily for his roles in fairy tale films and crime series, also took on the role of evil opponent .

Julie Jurištová , who plays the role of Princess Helenka here, became known for her fairy tale depictions in snow white and rose red and in The Ninth Heart .

literature

  • Božena Němcová : The Sun King, the Moon King, the Wind King, the beautiful Uliana and the two horses . In The King of Time . Slovak fairy tales translated from Slovak by Peter Hrivinák, Bratislava 1978, pp. 172–183.
  • Karel Jaromír heirs : Princess Golden Hair . In: Princess Golden Hair and other Czech fairy tales . Illustrated by Artuš Scheiner , translated by Günther Janosch, pp. 63–78, Albatros-Verlag, Prague 1981.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See The Prince and the Evening Star . on p. 319–323 in 77 fairy tale films - A film guide for young and old (ed.) Eberhard Berger, Joachim Giera u. a., Henschel Verlag GmbH, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-362-00447-4 .
  2. ^ Title and type of fairy tale AT in Kurt Derungs: Märchenlexikon
  3. ↑ Karel Jaromír Erben: Princess Goldhaar in Princess Goldhaar and other Czech fairy tales , Prague 1981
  4. ↑ Prince and Evening Star. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used