Jirí Sequens built a long and successful career as a film director by wedding the dictates of Fifties-style heroic social realism to the dramatic requirements of slick, engrossing action. His location-shot thrillers and war films culminated in Assassination (1964), a vivid widescreen re-creation — five years in preparation — of the wartime assassination in occupied Prague of Czechoslovakia’s brutal Nazi overlord Reinhard Heydrich and the ferocious reprisals that followed.

Born in Brno, he acted on stage and radio while still a student, graduating in 1946 from the drama department of Brno Conservatoire. He learnt film-making in Moscow under Eisenstein and Gerasimov, and following military service was stage manager at the E. F. Burian Theatre in Prague, then head of the State Film Theatre in Prague before writing and directing his first short film in 1949. His first feature, Happy Journey (1951), was a typical propaganda piece of that era about a young woman assisting in the collectivisation of private farms in her village.

Soon recognised for his skill at location work, Sequens and his cameraman, Rudolf Milic, travelled during 1957-58 on a Czech merchant ship, shooting colour footage which served as the basis of three films, including Sequens’s feature-length documentary Brother Ocean (1958). His more exotic later projects included Death on Sugar Island (1961), set on a tropical island, and co-productions filmed in Greece (Love in Lesbos, 1967) and India (Bitter Autumn with the Scent of Mangoes, 1983).

Another Sequens perennial was the detective story, starting with Windy Mountain (1955), a complex murder mystery whose origins turn out to lie in wartime Nazi attrocities. His work in TV included two popular long-running series (Sinners in the City of Prague and The Thirty Cases of Major Zeman) that were extended with extra footage into feature films for cinema release.

Between 1971 and 1990 Sequens also taught filmmaking at the FAMU film academy in Prague.

Jirí Sequens, writer-director, was born on April 23, 1922. He died on January 21, 2008, aged 85