Zdena Kadrnožková

Young prisoner Jan, nicknamed Roughboy (Petr Cepek), tries to commit suicide. He was imprisoned for a fight in which he injured a functionary of the National Committee and for stealing material but actually by the blame for this crime was pinned on him by the road-builders in whose group he worked. The prison doctor knows that Jan is an emotionally deprived person who never knew his parents and spent all his childhood - except one year with foster-parents - in orphanages, homes for youth and reform schools. He arranges a five-day holiday for Jan, who wants to find his mother's grave.

Matylda (Jaroslava Ticha), who lives in the Czech countryside, is trying to arrange burial plans for her dying husband, Jan (Ludvik Kroner). While Matylda hopes to have a funeral for Jan in the small town where they once lived, there are complications. Years earlier, Jan spoke out against the Communist government and was consequently expelled from the town. When Matylda fails to convince a local politician to allow the ceremony, she uses her husband's funeral as a public show of dissent.

The bank officer Bedrich Hroch is sent by the bank director to the zoo, which asked an allocation of one and half kg of gold for a gold tooth for a hippo. During the check up of the hippo's teeth Bedrich is swallowed by the hippo. The man does not die in the hippo's guts and he chats quite happily with his frightened wife Dása. Journalist Pip Karen, his friend is also present to the dialogue and he has immediately an idea how to use this special situation. He tells to the new minister Borovec and his opponent professor Fibinger that there is a hippo in the zoo which can speak. He also tells them how to use this situation for a political propaganda.

Major Kalas from the Prague criminal intelligence service has been sent to a small town of Dubá in North Bohemia to help with the investigation of the puzzling death of a child. A gypsy boy has been killed three weeks ago and his body found under a rock. As the investigation continues, another dead boy is found. The boy has bled to death after someone cut his artery with a handsaw. Both deaths are obviously the work of a murderer - a perverted pedophile, sadist who gets sexual satisfaction from the sight of a young boy's blood.

Detective Lieutenant Boruvka (Lubomír Lipský) is called to the State Scientific Library to investigate the loss of a precious manuscript, the Infernal Psalter of the Occult Sciences by Master Peregrinus from the eleventh century, written in a secret script which has only recently been deciphered by senior lecturer Zajíc (Josef Chvalina). Chaos is reigning in the labyrinth of passages and halls of the former monastery where the library is housed. In order to save space the director of the library has introduced a peculiar system. The books are arranged in the bookcases according to height and six girls dressed in black, the library assistants, are quite happy to cut volumes down to size in case of need. Boruvka refuses the case, since he is specialist in murders. He has to return to the investigation, however, when senior lecturer Zajíc disappears.

The exemplary accountant Antonín Safránek lives his orderly life as a citizen of a small town. His wife Eliska brings up their three children and desperately tries to get by on her husband's low salary every month. At the same time, she sadly watches the luxurious life of their neighbor and other people like him who have no qualms about improving their standard of living by cheating. One day, the infallible Safránek makes a mistake in the cash clearance and there are nine one-hundred Crown bills left in the safe. An unexpected company control carried out the next day passes without problems and the account is closed. The temptation is too strong. The insufficient control enables Safránek to gradually steal one million Crowns.

The protagonist (Rudolf Hrusinsky) is a dull, fat, shy government clerk indulging in voyuerism and ego fantasies. In love with another clerk (Kveta Fiolova), he is urged on in his pursuit by a commiserate executive. The story is told in a flashback sequence as the cuckolded Hrusinsky attempts suicide by gassing himself in his bathtub. The "Murder" of the title is not a murder as such, rather the murder that Hrusinsky remembers planning upon discovering his wife's unfaithfulness with his supposed friend and advisor. Both plots failing in his mind, he loses himself in fantastic reveries of his funeral and of hypocritical mourners. ' Deciding (perhaps) that this is not the way out either, he gives up the attempt and imagines a life of reconciliation and eventual affluence.

Ivan Passer’s film concerns the dreams of two musician friends, one of whom, having left their small hometown to become successful, returns to visit the other who stayed behind to become a local music teacher.