The Shop on Main Street (1965)

How can profligate evil spread? Because ignorant people don’t know how to make change and are too scared to swim against the tide to commit to what they think is right. They actively participate in allowing others to convince them that they’ve got the whole scenario wrong, that their gut feeling is instead a small bout of indigestion. They dismiss the twinge that they feel in their soul as a small tic, and look to indulge in any activity that could help them exterminate the small feeling before it grows any bigger. The character Tono in The Shop on Main Street is one such person: a carpenter with a hen-pecking wife and a middling business, he is assigned to be the Aryan controller of a button shop owned by Mrs. Lautmann, an aged Jewish widow. How Tono is changed by Mrs. Lautmann in this capacity forms the basis for the tragedy that will follow.

Throughout the film, a monument to the Czechoslovakian town’s collaboration with the Nazis is under construction. Tono dismisses it, possibly out of anger inspired by his brother-in-law, one of the top Nazi officials in the town, who didn’t get Tono a job working on the edifice. As the column grows, so too does Tono’s sense of guilt. He understands that his life is not glamorous and that he doesn’t belong to the elite of the town who promenade down Main Street while patriotic music played by a big brass band fills the air. By taking the position as the Aryan controller of Mrs. Lautmann’s shop, he hopes to gain some control over his home and to able able to indulge in the good life. He tries to exert his influence on the shop, but realizes he is not savvy enough to run it profitably. He realizes, however, that the furniture in Mrs. Lautmann’s apartment behind the shop needs fixing, and being a good carpenter, he sets himself to the task. He does not count on making a genuine connection with the old widow or the little Jewish boy who visits with him while he works.

Tono sees the Jewish characters of his town as genuine people and not the gross, hateful caricatures that people like his brother- and sister-in-law make them out to be. The key to understanding Tono, however, is that he is ignorant and afraid. He asks the Jewish barber why him and others of his faith are being rounded up; the barber can’t say specifically but his eyes seem to know that it’s part of a persecution lasting generations. Later, the widow, horror-stricken, recognizes it for what it is: a Pogram. When Tono encounters hate in his town, he grows silent and joins the crowd rather than repeat his question to the barber. The desire to do right by the widow whom he care about, a woman who has shown him more genuine affection than his wife, and the fear of what may happen to him if the officials figure out he’s protecting her tears the man apart.

He daydreams of a different time and place where he assumes the role of Mrs. Lautmann’s long-dead husband Heinrich and they walk down Main Street together, free to enjoy the day and each other’s company. In the dream, Tono understands everything despite its surreal nature and the answers that stare him in the face back in reality can’t hurt him. He returns to the dream at the end of the film, but it retains little of its solace for the viewer.

The Shop on Main Street is an elegy to a time before evil became commonplace and when mere silence became complicity to a series of horrors beyond anyone’s imagination. The film is a plea for the future to not remain silent – or worse, indifferent – to injustice.