In an operating room, a team of medical staff is about to perform a caesarean section during a complicated delivery. Then a highly agitated man, Vladimír Čaban, breaks into the room with a gun in his hand and orders the doctors and nurses to step back to the window. The forty-year-old freelance constructer engineer Čaban is addicted to morphine, and today he has failed to find the money for his usual fix, which he secretly buys from a waiter named Kříž. To heavily in debt drug addict nobody wants to lend money anymore. His mother has no inkling that the morphine used years before to ease the pain of her seriously ill husband was stolen and abused by her now long grown-up only son. There is nothing left in the house for Čaban to sell. As evening comes, he is tormented by withdrawal symptoms and breaks into a pharmacy holding up his late father's gun. This proves fatal for two men from the police patrol, one of which had wanted to buy painkillers for an aching tooth. The agitated addict starts shooting and kills Sergeant Hošek. Now a murderer, he signs in at a hospital under a false name to be treated for kidney colic. The nurse at the hospital reception remembers him and sounds the alarm when she learns of the manhunt. Čaban has no way of escaping from the hospital surrounded by police and in panic takes the operating team hostage. The surgeon refuses to obey the blackmailer and starts the urgent operation. Before the drug addict can do anything, a police sharpshooter suspended from the roof brings him down. Just as the wounded Čaban is taken away, a child's cry is heard from the operating room.
morfinista Vladimír Čaban
Čabanova matka
chirurg MUDr. Mareš
lékárník
vedoucí vinárny
číšník Kříž
nadporučík VB Šíma, vyšetřovatel
strážmistr VB Hošek
rotný VB v lékárně
starožitník
projektant Jarda
vrchní sestra
zdravotní sestra Kalousová
Janda, manžel rodičky
taxikář
zástupce nadporučíka Šímy
zaměstnanec vinárny
zdravotní sestra v suterénu
instrumentářka
anestezioložka
vedoucí projekční kanceláře
pacient
lékař
zdravotní sestra v porodnici
klarinetista v baru
klavírista v baru
kytarista v baru
bubeník v baru
lékař na vyšetřovně
příslušník VB
on sám, major Leoš Jirsák z Federální kriminální ústředny
hlas MUDr. Mareše
hlas taxikáře
hlas vedoucího projekční kanceláře
Jiří Potsch, Žofie Futerová, Irena Hrušková
Eva Slívová, Marcel Kříž, Jiří Matějka
Dagmar Rašilovová
JUDr. Přemysl Velický
Jarmila Kovtanová, Růžena Hejsková, Jana Šimonová, Boris Halmi
Rukojmí
Hostages
povídka
feature
short-story
Czechoslovakia
1974
1974
Czech