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MovieMail's Review
Contains Eroica (Munk, 1958), Night Train (Kawalerowicz, 1959), Innocent Sorcerers (Wajda, 1960) and Goodbye, See You Tomorrow (Morgenstern, 1960). Michael Brooke applauds the set's quality.
What are the characteristics of a typical late-50s/early-60s Polish film? WWII drama? A dark psychological thriller? Andrzej Wajda as director? Zbigniew Cybulski and a boyish Roman Polanski amongst the cast? You’ll find all these ingredients in Second Run’s four-film Polish Cinema Classics box, but not in the way that you’d necessarily expect.
Wajda is indeed one of the directors, but his fifth feature Innocent Sorcerers (1960) is a contemporary drama about the troubled personal lives of assorted twentysomethings – Jerzy Skolimowski, twelve years Wajda’s junior, was hired to make the dialogue more convincing and also plays a boxer named Hamlet. Cybulski and Polanski are in this too, but the film’s protagonist is Basil (Tadeusz Lomnicki), a doctor and amateur jazz musician who never has trouble scoring with the ladies but is frustrated that none of his conquests ever turn into lasting relationships.
Emotional complications also fuel Janusz Morgenstern’s Goodbye, See You Tomorrow (1960), a film that superficially looks like a French new wave tribute about the hesitant romance between Jacek (Cybulski) and a capricious Frenchwoman, but was actually co-written by Cybulski in 1957. He also pops up in an amusingly foppish supporting role in Night Train (1959), Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s take on the popular train-thriller genre. Mostly set in a single sleeper carriage on an overnight trip to the Baltic coast, it revolves around two mismatched people, accidentally sharing the same compartment, each harbouring dark secrets – a risky situation when there’s a killer on the loose.
The WWII film is Andrzej Munk’s extraordinary Eroica (1958). For understandable reasons, most Polish films about the war tend to be deadly serious, but Munk’s riotous black comedy has at least as much to say about Polish patriotism and heroism, albeit from unexpected angles. For instance, the first part is about a drunken coward whose many failings paradoxically make him a perfect Resistance hero, while the second is about the men left behind in a German prison camp after one of their number escapes. But did he? The film is arguably the masterpiece of this excellent set.
All four films are presented from new HD digital transfers with restored picture and sound
A new filmed interview with director Andrzej Wajda
Extract from the 2009 documentary about Jerzy Kawalerowicz My Seventeen Lives
Andrzej Munk's 1958 short film A Walk in the Old Town of Warsaw.
Film Description
Contains Eroica (Andrzej Munk, 1958), Night Train (Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1959), Innocent Sorcerers (Andrzej Wajda, 1960) and Goodbye, See You Tomorrow (Janusz Morgenstern, 1960).
Eroica is a two-part study of heroism. One strand of the film follows the life of Dzidzius (Edward Dziewonski), a wily coward who tries everything in his power to avoid danger when recruited into the military. The other story is set in a POW camp, where Lt. Zawistowski (Tadeusz Lomnicki) appears especially eager to escape, but is he determined to rejoin the war effort or simply unable to stand the inmates with whom he shares a cell?
Night Train is a fast-paced, Hitchcock-influenced mystery set aboard a train headed for the Baltic coast. Jerzy and Marta end up sharing a sleeping compartment by mistake and are brought together by the fact that they are both on the run from something. However, while Marta is merely trying to evade a jealous former lover, the arrival of police on the train suggests that Jerzy is implicated in something far more sinister.
Innocent Sorcerers follows a young doctor whose compulsive womanising has left him tired and all but immune to the charms of the girls who attempt to seduce him. However, when he enjoys an intense conversation with a mysterious woman, Pelagia, who subsequently disappears, Bazyli finds himself smitten and sets off around the city in search of her.
Goodbye, See You Tomorrow is a story about a youthful infatuation in which a young actor meets a beautiful French girl. It is love at first sight - but how will the young man cope with the vicissitudes of love? A young Roman Polanski makes an appearance.
