An entirely different link with literature brought about the successes and the failures of Vojtech Jasny's former codirector, Karel Kachyna. By a series of coincidences, Jan Prochazka, a hearty, talented and exceptionally prolific writer, became a favorite of the political leadership for a number of years, and thus gained almost unlimited influence in Czechoslovak film. As time went on, Kachyna became the sole director of Prochazka's scripts, touching with increasing daring on painful and taboo subjects from the past 25 years. Between 1961 and 1970, the Kachyna-Prochazka team made 11 fiction films. The best of them, "Long Live the Republic" ("At zije republika" - 1965), looks through the merciless, politically unbiased eyes of a child at a legend of national heroism at the time the country was being liberated from the fascist occupation. Prochazka's position inspired and made possible other controversial Kachyna films, including another provocative view of the war, "Carriage to Vienna" ("Kocar do Vidne" - 1967), which, in showing the period of the collectivization of agriculture in a most unflattering light, initiated the open conflict between Prochazka and the political establishment. The last two films to emerge from this collaboration, "Funny Old Man" ("Smesny pan" - 1969) about a victim of the persecution of the fifties, and "The Ear" ("Ucho" - 1970), about powerful men's horror of the system that they themselves established, were eventually banned. Prochazka became one of the targets of the persecution of intellectuals after 1968, and died of cancer in 1971.
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