Good film --BUT the anachronisms bother me
It seems to me that this film's screenplay has the sexual revolution (commonly attributed to the 1960s) time-travelling back and permeating TWO of the central female characters BUT NOT others.
I graduated from high school in 1945. While it was a small Vermont town, I don't think it was that much different than many other places in the USA.
At that time, HS kids were fairly reserved about having intercourse. We "necked" (kissing, hugging) on dates and "petted" (hands touching skin under loosened clothing) with those with whom we were more seriously involved. At my HS (500 students) maybe every 5-7? years a HS girl would get pregnant (none ever did in my class of 100). In a few classes, a girl or 2 might be known as a school or class slut; our class had one in its 4 years.
But most kids respected a barrier against actual intromission at least before being engaged. [In testament to this, there's the well-known, droll Vermont maxim that the gestation length for a couple's first child is usually 5-6 months whereas their later children always take 9 months.:)]
And this didn't seem to be just a Vermont thing.
Those beliefs/standards seem shared by my Army buddies in the USA & Korea and by the girls I dated in Washington, D.C., where I worked a few years after the Army, and then later in Columbia, MO, where I went to university.
However, as the mid/late '40s morphed into the '50s, there were RAPID changes in standards of sexual behavior among my peers (late teens, early twenties).
I remember "petting" standards briefly shifted to allowing bodies to be nude in bed (but without actual penetration) before quickly shifting farther. That seemed universally true in the company I kept in Columbia, MO, with UMizzou, Stephens, & Christian College girls.
AND among my acquaintances, by 1950-53, relationships realizing the enjoyment of "fully adult" sex grew increasingly common among college age students.
My sense is that the narrative of "Closely Watched Trains" borrows from this later sexual liberation (commonly attributed to "The 60s") to visit Czech life in 1944 and transplant SOME of that there -- AS IF the young female telegrapher who played strip poker and whose skin on her legs and butt was progressively stamped as she progressively lost more clothes AS IF she had very much enjoyed the titillation, provocation (and ???) AND AS IF the girl fascinated with Milos would only keep her fascination and be satisfied by having sustained intercourse with him.
I find it VERY difficult to believe that, in 1944 Czechoslovakia, these 2 girls were that much ahead of the spirit of the times (the Zeitgeist) of moral behavior for young girls in western civilization. That aspect seems VERY anachronistic -- way out of keeping time-wise. But maybe it does inject a bit more comedy in the narrative?
And since most viewers of this film will not have been teenagers in 1944--or even born by then--maybe this will not be a problem for them?
But, is there anyone familiar with Czechoslovakian morality in that era with dissenting beliefs like mine? --or from the USA or anywhere else? Or bothered by the same thing? Is there anyone else reading this who's also in their 80s or 90s?