Background Miloš Forman's first feature film
Černý Petr (
Black Peter) was released in 1964 and was not viewed favorably by Czech governmental authorities until it was selected for competition at that year's
Locarno Film Festival, where it won the
top prize, thereby gaining the approval of Czechoslovakia's communist bureaucracy and making it possible for Forman to pursue further projects with relative freedom. Unsure of what the next project should be, Forman recalled an experience he had had driving around Prague late one evening when he had encountered a young woman struggling to cross a bridge while carrying a heavy suitcase. He gave her a lift and learned her story: she had come to the big city from
Varnsdorf, where she had been seduced by a young engineer, who had given her a phony address in
Žižkov and promised to take her away from her dreary life. After confirming that she had been duped, Forman interviewed the girl for much of the rest of the night, before putting her on a train back to her home town. Commentators have noted that Forman was particularly sensitized to such situations because when he was 10, his mother had been taken away by the
Gestapo, never to be seen again, which led to years of Forman traveling around searching for security with nothing but a suitcase. In Forman's words: "I guess I'll always be moved by the sight of a young person with a suitcase seeking a connection in a strange city." Forman recounted this memory to fellow film enthusiasts and colleagues
Ivan Passer and
Jaroslav Papoušek and asked them if it might be the basis for a good film. "Maybe", replied Passer, "but it still needs one more thing – a billiards table." When the finished script was submitted to the Šebor-Bor production team, it was approved at first, only to have the chief of the script department pronounce it the dullest thing he'd read in years and urge Forman not to proceed with the project, since it would spoil the good reputation the director had established with
Black Peter. In Forman's words: "It wasn't arty enough, but, on the other hand, it didn't have enough commercial appeal either. It would offend and irritate the public, he told me, because it made fun of the common man, who would be disgusted by it." Despite this objection, Vlastimil Harnach, the head of the studio, approved proceeding with the film in part because, due to the political and cultural thaw in Czechoslovakia at the time, decision makers were anxious to avoid the appearance of overt administrative interference in the creative process.
Casting Forman and his colleagues were committed to the strategy of casting non-professionals and using dialogue improvisation whenever possible. Most of the actors were chosen from among relatives, friends and acquaintances of Forman and his crew, to the point where Forman was later to liken the atmosphere to making a "home movie". The factory supervisor was played by the actual public relations manager of the factory at
Zruč nad Sázavou, where location shooting took place. For the main trio of reservists, Forman wanted to use non-professionals, including the writer
Josef Škvorecký, but found that, while the three men did well improvising together whenever they appeared in pairs, they lost their rhythm when all three were included in the same shot. So Forman went to Škvorecký and told the writer that he looked too intelligent to play his role and replaced him with the professional actor
Vladimír Menšík. In Škvorecký's words: "To tell someone that he is too intelligent to be an actor is a very nice way of letting him know that he should stay with screen-play writing. Milos is a very considerate person. The fact that he so gently threw me out made possible the greatest scene of
Loves of a Blonde". Forman was later to justify his decision to add a professional: "While nonactors keep the actors honest and real, the actors give the scene the rhythm and shape that the nonactors don't feel. A nonactor inhabits the situation so completely that he or she isn't able to view it from the outside, to perceive it as a rhythmic whole with its punctuation and its larger dramatic purpose. Nonactors are perfectly content to repeat themselves and ramble on, so an actor can pull them through the dramatic arch of the scene and draw out the emotional contours of the situation." Ironically, the least self-confident performer in the film was one of the few professional actors: Vladimír Pucholt, who played the pianist. According to Forman: "This great actor, who had tremendous artistic intuition, completely mistrusted his talent. I think this was because he had a very rationalist disposition and could never see, much less measure, the result of his acting. 'Was it good, Mr. Forman?' he asked me after every perfect shot. 'It was excellent!' 'Really?' 'Really.' He never believed me and all of us loved him." Since he was working with a largely non-professional cast, Forman's operating procedure was never to share the script with any of the performers, because if he had given them the screenplay, "they’ll take it home to read, and their wives will end up directing your movie". Instead, he chose to explain each scene in great detail just before starting to shoot takes, reciting the dialog from memory only one time, so that when the camera was rolling the actors had to try to remember as much as they could of what he had told them and then improvise to the best of their ability what they had forgotten or only half-understood. His cameraman was later to say that, as a result, all the performers were playing Miloš Forman playing their roles. Ondříček and Forman had met at Czechoslovakia's
Barrandov Studios in the early 1960s when Ondříček was just learning to shoot feature films and Forman was struggling to create his own early projects. Ondříček was in full accord with Forman's reliance on non-professional actors, adopting a
cinéma-vérité style compatible with orthodox
socialist realism. Ondříček was schooled in documentary filmmaking and, as a result, he insisted on performing all photographic tasks, like focus, lighting and composing, personally, while refusing access to the set by all film editors, saying: "The editor can only edit what I am filming. He can't use a
master shot if he doesn't have it. He can't make a
close-up if he doesn't have it. This is our [his and Forman's] job." The big dance was the film's most sustained and elaborate sequence, so two cameras were used, with frequent recourse to
hand-holding and
telephoto zooming in order both to sustain the documentary-style look and feel and to take pressure off the performers, who were not always sure whether they were being included in the shots. During filming, the set was visited by British director
Lindsay Anderson, whose film
This Sporting Life was greatly admired by Forman. Anderson was so impressed by Ondříček's work, that he brought the cameraman to England to film
The White Bus and
if...., announcing that he had found a person with a new sensibility, “a new pair of eyes”. Ironically, the storyline of the film was replayed in real life. One of the nonprofessional actresses, a blonde factory worker, had a torrid affair with a technician who was part of the film crew. Although the man neglected to tell her that he was married with a child, he promised to send for her when he got back to Prague and set her up in an apartment in the capital city. After waiting for a long time to hear from him, and telling all her friends that she would shortly be summoned to her love nest, she packed up her belongings and traveled to Prague, only to be spurned in no uncertain terms. The consequence of this situation was grimmer than the
denouement of the film; the girl was embarrassed to return home, became a prostitute, went to jail, attempted suicide and finally emigrated to Australia, where there was a shortage of women, especially among Czech emigrants.
Editing Once principal photography was finished, Forman found himself with miles of raw material, so he and his editor, Miroslav Hájek, spent many long hours organizing the footage into a series of situations, like the "big dance" situation and the "meeting the parents" situation. In turn, each of these situations are constructed out of sequences of gags in which the characters improvise, in the words of commentator Constantin Parvulescu, "like various instruments of a band": "Many of these situations can be broken down into gags. There are several such gags reminiscent of early comedy in
Loves of a Blonde: the soldiers-getting-off-the-train gag; the wine-bottle gag; the wedding-ring gag; the palm-reading gag; the roll-up-blinds gag; and the three-guys-in-two-beds gag." Interspersed with these gags are extended character improvisations, such as Milda's discussion of Picasso, his mother's rants at the dining table, and the factory supervisor's appeal for the army's support. One of these scenes, which was included in the US version, involved a slapstick sequence in which Milda, the pianist, tries to pick up a buxom girl on the streets of Prague, only to have her trick him into entering the wrong bedroom of the four-story building in which she lives, disturbing the sleeping residents. ==Themes==