Commissioner Bartošek is visited by Dr. Goldberg, who reports the disappearance of his friend, the famous actor Benda. From the flimsy evidence, it appears that Benda left his apartment one night without taking anything with him and was taken away by car. He had not gone out for the entire week before, had not washed, had not shaved, and had drunk until he was debauched. The police search has reached a dead end. The actor Lebduška reveals to Goldberg that Benda had an affair with the actress Gréta, the wife of a prominent businessman, Bartošek's classmate Korbel. Goldberg eventually manages to exhume an unknown vagrant, whose body was found shortly after Benda's disappearance...

"At the turn of the 10th and 11th centuries Boleslav's kingdom fell apart in the fratricidal war between the Premyslovci and the other clans the main profiteer of this being the German emperor. At that time it seemed as if the Czech state and the lineage of its princes was awaiting its end..." It is with these words that the tale of this film begins, whose narrative is based upon the the play by Frantisek Hrubín of the same name.

Drama set on an isolated farm on the Czech-Polish border immediately after the end of WWII.

Oldrich Danek, the scriptwriter for "Hic Sunt Leones", who made his debut as a director in 1960 with the officially irreproachable "Three Tons of Dust" ("Tri tuny prachu"), also turned to history - "The Nuremberg Campaign" ("Spanila jizda" - 1963) - to seek metaphors for the present. In 1967, Danek made his best film, "The Royal Blunder" ("Kralovsky omyl"), a fourteenth-century tale about the relativity of despotic power. Historical material was by far the best medium for Frantisek Vlacil, who in 1967 completed his unique reconstruction of thirteenth-century Bohemia, "Marketa Lazarova", based on the novel by V. Vancura. Supported by the photography of B. Batka, he achieved an almost flawless recreation of a period that hovered between paganism and Christianity and filled it with authentic portraits of people from another civilization.