The family is connected with Prague's "Kolbenka", the ČKD locomotive factory. Grandfather Antonín, already retired, son Rudolf, a master in the locomotive assembly section and grandson Antonín, a promising football player. The film also tells the story of Rudolf's daughter Vera - each generation has its own ideas about life and cannot identify with the others. The film is linked by retrospective sequences from the lives of Antonín the Elder and Rudolf, especially from the war years. It is a realistic take on working-class life, unencumbered by ideology (despite the opening dedication), featuring well-known and time-tested actors in mainly male roles.

In the 1600s, an overzealous clergy hauls innocent women in front of tribunals, forces them to confess to imaginary witchery, and engages in brutal torture and persecution of their subjects.

After an attack against the guard of the Third Reich, Nazi repression intensifies, and the Czechoslovakian resistance's organized sabotage in an aircraft factory leads to Gestapo shootings.

Mr. Angel goes winter sporting and at the same time investigates his son's fiancee.

The second part of the revolutionary Hussite trilogy takes place in the years 1419-1420.

An ambitious and selfish lawyer confesses to the murder of his first wife. Some of the scenes were filmed in the last weeks of the war.

The first part of the "Hussite Revolutionary Trilogy", completed with Jan Žižka (1955) and Proti všem (Against All Odds, 1957). The film captures the period from May 1412 to the summer of 1415, a turbulent time in the Czech Kingdom, during which there were protests in Prague against the sale of "omnipotent indulgences" whose sale throughout the kingdom was announced by Pope John XXIII. The ideological leader of this movement is the preacher Master Jan Hus, whose words, calling for the elimination of church abuses, are listened to in the Bethlehem Chapel by thousands of ordinary Praguers, Czech lords and Queen Sophie, wife of the Czech King Wenceslas IV.