Now a cult film Beds tells the tragicomic story of two families, which takes place at the end of the 1960s and ends with the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia. The image is based on the design of Petr Šabach and behind its script is Petr Jarchovský (59). The one in explained that the film was supposed to continue with a scene that convinced actor Jaroslav Dušek (64) to take on the role of teacher Saša Mašlaň.
The original ending of the film was supposed to contain a story that was based on a real family incident of the singer Vašek Koubek. It concerned shopping trips to the then German Democratic Republic (GDR), where Czechoslovaks went to buy better quality shoes. Since their importation was prohibited, people dealt with it cunningly: they traveled across the border in old sneakers, then threw them in the trash and traveled back in new shoes.
However, the East German customs officials saw through this trick and mercilessly confiscated the new shoes from the passengers during bus inspections. The film teacher was to experience exactly such a humiliating end to the trip. According to the original story, the customs officials confiscated the passengers’ shoes in the bitter cold of February and put only ordinary plastic bags on their feet. The bus then dropped them off at the snowy and icy square in Teplice.
“Have you ever tried to walk on ice in plastic bags? It’s impossible, it’s impossible,” co-creator Petr Jarchovský described the situation. In the film, it was supposed to be a long, almost Chaplin-esque shot, in which the desperate Mašlan would slide and crawl on all fours from a trip to the GDR to school.
Dušek was looking forward to this grotesque scene so much that he allegedly took the role precisely because of it. In the end, however, the legendary director Jiří Krejčík intervened, who played the professor in Pelíške.
He explained to the creators that it would completely disrupt the atmosphere of the film. “He told us, ‘Guys, the movie ends emotionally in that 1968. That’s where it’s at. Put that somewhere else, it’s the ’70s, it’s normalized,'” Jarchovský recalled the moment he decided that this scene would remain at the bottom of his drawer forever.
