Under Suspicion.(I Served the King of England)(Movie review)

Ji?i Menzel's "I Served the King of England" is a Czech national epic served up with champagne and truffles. This graceful and leisurely movie, adapted from a 1974 novel by the masterly Bohumil Hrabal, covers an enormous time span, starting in the nineteen-thirties, then passing through the Nazi occupation and the Communist period. It covers an enormous range of experience, too, yet the style is consistently playful, even frivolous, and slyly erotic--at times, we might be watching a burlesque operetta. Menzel, whose first adaptation of Hrabal's work, "Closely Watched Trains," won an Academy Award in 1967, did not emigrate to this country, as Ivan Passer and Milos Forman, ...