Men Without Wings is a 1946 film from Czechoslovakia directed by František Čáp.
It's a story about the Czech resistance to the Nazis during World War II, which ended just a year before the movie was released. The story opens on June 10, 1942, as engineer Petr Lom is escorting his nephew Jirka back to Jirka's home town of Lidice. Only they can't make it, because the whole area is blocked off by the Nazis—who are that day wiping Lidice off the map, in retribution for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The Lidice massacre
claims among its victims Jirka's mother (Petr's sister) and father. A shocked Jirka and Petr go back to his room in a boarding house.
The boarding house is near a military airport that serves the Luftwaffe. The airport is run by a loathsome Sudeten German and Nazi, Ullmann, who is assisted by his lovely secretary Jana. Petr gets a job at the airport in the machine shop, but he is bent on revenge, and starts stealing weaponry to somehow use against the Germans. What Petr doesn't know is that the airport machine shop is already an active resistance cell, aided by Jana, who is spying on her employers and passing messages to and from La Résistance.
Tropes:
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Sweet, pretty, gentle Marta, Petr's neighbor in the boarding house, for whom he develops romantic feelings. She's a paid Gestapo agent.
- Death of a Child: Poor little Jirka, who can't be older than 14. Shot and killed by the Germans, after they catch him with one of the grenades that Petr hid in the wing of a derelict aircraft.
- Dies Wide Open: Petr at the end, after he goes down shooting against the Nazi goons.
- Distant Finale: As Petr dies over the end, superimposed over his face is a Time-Passes Montage that initially shows the Germans torturing his friends at the machine shop, but moves on to scenes of resistance and uprising and ends with raising the flag of Czechoslovakia again at the end of the war.
- Dramatic Gun Cock: A Nazi makes a point of loading his Luger and chambering a round to scare Jirka, who has been arrested.
- Empathy Doll Shot: Jirka's model airplane is used twice for this after his death. First a despondent Petr cradles the airplane when he comes back to the boarding house after Jirka is executed. Later, a Gestapo goon steps on the plane as the Gestapo searches Petr's room.
- Fainting: Jana faints after watching little Jirka's execution. This is more plot-relevant than most cases of a woman fainting, because she has a highly incriminating document in her Victoria's Secret Compartment, which Ullmann sees when it slips partway out of her dress.
- Good Hair, Evil Hair: Hilariously, Ullmann the Sudeten Nazi has a Hitler mustache and an absurd combover that makes him strongly resemble the Fuhrer.
- Gossipy Hens: The older ladies near the beginning who make scornful comments about how lovely Jana sure does spend a lot of time with German officers. They don't know she's a spy for La Résistance.
- High-Voltage Death: Ullmann meets his end when the workers at the plant chase him right into a high voltage transformer. He's electrocuted.
- Instant Death Bullet: How pretty much everyone—Marta, the unnamed head collaborator, the various Nazis, and Jirka—go when they get shot, falling over dead. Everyone but Petr, that is.
- Last Breath Bullet: Petr, already shot, has enough energy to squeeze off a bullet and kill the head collaborator.
- Les Collaborateurs
- The unnamed Czech who's wearing an evil leather trenchcoat and seems to be an officer of some sort with the secret police.
- Sweet, pretty Marta, who as it turns out is a Gestapo agent.
- Pietà Plagiarism: Petr, carrying Jirka's body to be buried after the Gestapo shoots him.
- The Quisling: Ullmann. Ullmann is a Sudeten German, one of the ethnic-German Czech citizens who helped destabilize and partition the country in 1938, eventually facilitating the 1939 Nazi takeover. He's the boss at the aircraft factory and suspects, but can't prove, that his people are conducting sabotage.
- Suicide Attack: Partially to make sure Jana has the chance to get away, and partially because he wants to, Petr comes out from the shadows as the Gestapo has all the workers rounded up, demanding to know who killed Ullmann. He says "I did!" and starts shooting, killing several bad guys before he's cut down by a submachine gun.
- Time-Passes Montage: A montage at the end as Petr dies shows revolt and uprising and finally the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945.
- Vehicular Sabotage: Among the activities performed by the airport resistance cell is sabotaging Nazi airplanes so that they burn up in flight.
- Victoria's Secret Compartment: Jana keeps a highly incriminating transcription of a coded message from the Russians in her blouse. It probably would have been fine, except when she fainted, causing the message to fall out and causing Ullmann to realize she's a spy.
