A Major Role for Rosmaryna

Bonzurka is a seasoned director who makes films for children, and she's putting together a new picture called "The Knee." Alongside her reliable assistants Drahuska and Honza, she holds auditions to find youngsters who are unshy, expressive, and comfortable in front of a camera. The casting proves tricky because the story needs a girl to play a character who lost her hair to illness and spends a holiday in the countryside with a head that looks like a knee. Makeup can't quite fake the look, and most hopefuls balk at the idea of baldness. Eventually a confident girl named Rosemary is willing to cut and shave her long hair so the role can be authentic.

Released in 1978, the film was directed by Věra Plívová-Šimková, with a screenplay by Ota Hofman and Zdeněk Rytíř. The cast includes Iva Janžurová as Bonzurka, Dagmar Havlová Veškrnová as Drahuska, Jiří Lábus as Honza, Jiří Krampol, and Josef Bláha in supporting roles.

Box office figures from the film's original run aren't widely recorded, so reliable gross or budget numbers aren't readily available for reference. It seems to have circulated mainly within its home market rather than registering internationally in box office tallies.

The film leaves a strong visual memory in its central shaving scene and in the unusual film-within-film setup, where adults run a casting process while kids react honestly. That sequence, and the image of a child choosing to lose her hair for a part, tends to stick with viewers and comes up when people recall 1970s family comedies from the region.

Critics and audiences tend to view the movie as a warm, lightly comic story that highlights courage, friendship, and the small compromises of creative work. It balances behind-the-scenes jokes about production with sincere moments about childhood and selfhood, and it holds a modest user rating of 6.0 out of 10 on the cited source.