I Served the King of England

Set in Czechoslovakia across the inter-war years and beyond, this film follows Jan Dítě, an ambitious young waiter who sets out to become a millionaire. He decides that the way to get ahead is to be diligent, observe everything around him, stay discreet and turn whatever he learns to his own advantage. His career takes him from a hotel in a small border town to a grand establishment in Prague, but the political upheavals of the twentieth century keep disrupting his plans. The story moves between his rise and his later years, after he has spent nearly fifteen years in prison and settles in an abandoned German village, looking back on his youth.

Jiří Menzel directed and wrote the screenplay, returning to feature filmmaking long after his 1968 Capricious Summer. Ivan Barnev plays the younger Jan, with Oldřich Kaiser as the older Jan, and Julia Jentsch appears as Líza. The credited cast runs to 55 performers, among them Marián Labuda, Milan Lasica and Zuzana Fialová. A Slovak-Czech co-production shot largely at Barrandov Studio, the film runs 115 minutes and was released in January 2007.

On IMDb it holds 6 out of 10 from a small number of votes, while on TMDB it has 6.8 from a larger sample. The critics' rating of 7.2 from 88 reviews is higher than either audience figure.