I cannot say that I am not a fan of the Czech style of humor: ¨black¨, or absurdist.
When in Prague, he went to a "Black Theater" every night. Eventually, I got tired of the show genre.
I did enjoy the films Fireman's Ball , Taking Off and Peter the Black
(with blackness in the title itself) by Milos Forman.
But Closely Watched Trains? an Oscar for best foreign film in 1966? Wait a minute... I don't know exactly in what year it was released in the USA but 1966 was also the year of:
Persona
Au hasard Balthazar
Battle of Algiers
Hunger
Even min or films like
The war is over, by Resnais
Saura's The hunt
The Brancaleone Army
A new world, by De Sica
Der Junge Torless
As Cariocas
Engraçadinha after 30
La curée, by Vadim
were superior to these Trains, which revolve around a naive young man and his sexual initiation. It might have been funny, but it isn't. Even the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia is treated comically. I didn't see the movie at the time, but today... Quite boring & irrelevant.