Top cast:Paul Panzer,Gladys Hulette
Director:Michael Keaton
Genre:Romance
Region:Czech Republic
Year:2001
Storyline:The undated story was a bittersweet, maturely-intelligent drama about the disintegration and dissolution of an older couple's roubled marriage during an extended grand tour of Europe.Artistic performances by a self-absorbed group of disguised, impersonating "ham" actors (who had been forbidden to perform an anti-Hitler play in their own theatre) took to their own 'stage' (with clever tricks of the trade) to challenge, subvert, ridicule and mock the authoritarian political agenda of the Nazi regime and its main proponents.The butler and the woman of the house both mistakenly believe that he is the animal mortician who has come to provide a satin-lined coffin for the burial of her beloved pet monkey [a significant fact, for Joe's presence at the mansion leads to his own death] - positioned in her ornately-decorated bedroom on her massage table in front of a roaring fire: "He always liked fires and poking at them with a stick."The story flashes back to six months earlier, when Joe, a struggling, down-and-out, depressed, Midwestern hack screenwriter, finds that he is unable to sell his scripts ("I seemed to have lost my touch") and is behind three payments on his car.