General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

I Served the King of England

I Served the King of England (Czech: Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále) is a 2006 Czech-Slovak comedy-drama directed by Jiří Menzel, adapted from the novel of the same name by the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. It follows Jan Dítě, a diminutive waiter who schemes his way to a millionaire's fortune through the prewar hospitality trade, the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, and a 15-year Communist prison sentence, telling his life in flashback from a provincial border town in the early 1960s.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále; Slovak co-production title Obsluhoval som anglického kráľa¹
Director and writer	Jiří Menzel, his sixth screen adaptation of Hrabal's work³
Premiere and runtime	19 December 2006 (Czech Republic); 120 minutes¹
Principal cast	Ivan Barnev (young Jan Dítě), Oldřich Kaiser (old Jan Dítě), Julia Jentsch (Líza), Martin Huba (Skřivánek), Marián Labuda (Walden)²
Key crew	Cinematography Jaromír Šofr, music Aleš Březina, editing Jiří Brožek⁴
Budget	CZK 84,450,000; principal photography March to June 2006⁴
Honors	Four Czech Lions (Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography) and the FIPRESCI prize in competition at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival³

Spoilers

Plot

The film opens in the early 1960s, when the aging Jan Dítě is released from a Communist prison, where he spent almost 15 years for "being a millionaire", and is sent to work as a roadmender in a decrepit Sudeten border town abandoned by its German inhabitants. From there he looks back on his life.³^•²

The young waiter's rise. In flashback, the short, ambitious Jan works his way up from selling sausages at a railway station to waiting tables in a pub, then to the Tichota and Paříž hotels in Prague. He is trained by the head waiter Skřivánek, who once served the King of England, and he studies the rich men he serves, believing that hearing everything, seeing everything, and using what he learns will make him a millionaire and a hotel owner.³^•² He is given the chance to serve the Abyssinian emperor and receives a medal from him.³

War and fortune. By the late 1930s Hitler has taken the Sudetenland and is breaking apart Czechoslovakia. Jan falls in love with and marries Líza, a Sudeten German proud of her Aryan blood, and through this collaborationist marriage his dream of owning a hotel paradoxically comes true. When Líza returns from the front she brings a fortune in rare stamps that Jews had "left behind"; after her death Jan sells the stamps and becomes a millionaire, but enjoys the fortune for only three years before the new Communist regime imprisons him for 15 years, one for each of his millions.²^•³

In the border town, stripped of his ambitions, he reflects on the events that shaped his life and on what might have happened had he played a different role in them.²

Production history

The film was Menzel's first feature in more than a decade, following The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1994), and it came 40 years after his Oscar-winning Closely Watched Trains (1966), also adapted from a Hrabal novel.⁵^•⁶ Menzel had begun collaborating on the project in the 1990s while Hrabal was still alive, but the owners of the rights sold the project to a private television company, and the film languished in pre-production amid legal battles over the book's rights. Menzel described giving the producer a public beating at a film festival over the lost rights; years later the rights holder returned with the offer to complete the film.⁷^•⁶

The production was a Czech-Slovak co-production with German and Hungarian participation, shot on 35 mm between March and June 2006 with post-production through November, on a budget of CZK 84,450,000. Producers included Robert Schaffer and Andrea Metcalfe, with Rudolf Biermann as executive producer.⁴

Adaptation and style

Menzel, who made his international reputation largely through Hrabal adaptations, aimed to retain the poetic style of the original while keeping it accessible to a broad audience. Critics located the film in the Czech tradition of self-deprecating dark humor mixed with personal tragedy that dates to the 1960s New Wave, and noted its debt to silent comedy: the New York Times wrote that Ivan Barnev's performance, with the poker face and agility of a silent clown, defines a film whose timing and physical comedy look back to 1920s slapstick.³^•⁸

Reviewers also read the film as commentary on Czech history. Menzel pointed to a sentence he added that is not in the book, "We Czechs do not make war", as a leitmotif of Czech history, and said that any moral in the story had to be told the way a friend tells a friend something.⁷ The Washington Post compared the striving, innocent Jan to Jay Gatsby and Chaplin's Little Tramp; the Guardian described a naive antihero prospering under prewar capitalism, surviving the Nazi occupation, and being jailed by the postwar Communist regime, with bureaucracy, snobbery, avarice, and self-seeking flourishing in each era.⁹^•¹⁰ Reception was not uniformly warm: some critics found the film's treatment of history too gentle, with one review in the Austin Chronicle arguing that it glides through history lacking any sense of real danger.⁸

Reception and awards

The film premiered in the Czech Republic on 19 December 2006 and opened in Slovakia on 25 January 2007, later reaching the United Kingdom and United States in 2008.¹^•¹¹ It drew more than 850,000 admissions in Czech cinemas.¹²

At the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival, where it screened in competition, it won the FIPRESCI prize. It received four Czech Lions: Best Film (producer Rudolf Biermann), Best Director (Menzel), Best Supporting Actor (Martin Huba), and Best Cinematography (Jaromír Šofr), with further nominations for Julia Jentsch, Oldřich Kaiser, Menzel's screenplay, editing, music, and design. The European Film Academy placed it on the 2007 Feature Film Selection shortlist and it was nominated for the People's Choice Award.³^•¹³^•²

Anglophone critics were broadly favorable. The film holds a Metascore of 72 based on 26 critic reviews, with 21 positive and 5 mixed, and a 79% Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics consensus praises Menzel's charm and eye for life's bittersweet moments.⁸^•¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026