The Best of Poland

The Polish Film Festival in America was launched Wednesday with an invitational premiere of Andrzej Wajda’s “Mr. Thaddeus” at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and tonight it presents “Daniel Olbrychski--One-Man Show,” with the renowned actor performing in Polish in a live appearance at 8 at the John Raitt Theater, 6425 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Festival screenings will run Friday through Tuesday at the Music Hall Theater, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, and will include 12 recent features and two revivals, Wajda’s 1976 Oscar-nominated “The Promised Land” and Aleksander Ford’s “Knights of the Teutonic Order” (1960).

Long Poland’s leading veteran director, Wajda is a born storyteller who can express himself through a camera with the same control and directness as a great writer can with a pen. A firmly committed filmmaker without being didactic or a propagandist, he gets his actors to live rather than act their parts.

In “Promised Land” (Saturday at noon), set in the late 19th century, Daniel Olbrychski, who is lean and intense, is the ruthless son of faded gentry who joins with two friends, one a Jew (Wojciech Pszoniak), the other a German (Andrzej Seweryn), to make his fortune in the burgeoning wool and cotton mills of Lodz, at the time under czarist rule. Olbrychski is never really sympathetic, yet his personal magnetism, combined with his wit and intelligence, makes him an engaging antihero.

“Promised Land” is one of the swiftest-paced, most exhilarating three-hour sagas ever filmed. Wajda buoyantly sustains a brace of subplots, all the while satirizing the vulgarity of the nouveau riche and indicating the inhumanity of the rapacious Lodz captains of industry (who could as easily be from any other 19th century manufacturing capital in Europe or America). That some of them are Jewish brought charges of anti-Semitism among members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences when the film was nominated (which infuriated Wajda), but it’s actually the Poles and the Germans who are portrayed as villains of the darkest order.

Olbrychski, who became a Wajda favorite and a film star in the wake of the untimely death of Zbigniew Cybulski, also stars in Krzysztof Zanussi’s witty, sparkling, 57-minute, 1997 made-for-TV “The Last Disc” (Saturday at 3:30 p.m.) as an internationally renowned ballet dancer who has returned to his native Poland after a 20-year absence for a special performance to benefit a charity. Still dashing though now a bit jowly, Olbrychski’s dancer is a proud, temperamental lady-killer in his 40s plagued by a bad back, who knows his dancing days are drawing to a close but is not about to admit it publicly. Fate deems that he will be teamed with his ex-wife (Olga Sawicka), who is bitter at his long-ago desertion but amused at being paired with him again.

Adek Drabinski’s 1997 “The Trap” (Sunday at 3:30 p.m.) also deals with a performer returning to Poland after a long absence. Alas, in this rueful, darkly comic take on film noir, Marek Kondrat’s Maciek Adamski is not remotely in the same league as Olbrychski’s dancer. A husky, middle-aged actor, Adamski, as Mickey Adams, had scant success in the States, and we’re given the impression that he in fact spent more time removing asbestos than acting. He auditions for the role of Stanley in a Warsaw stage revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and would not be bad casting, but he swiftly gambles away on horses money borrowed from underworld types, who in return force him to pay them back by involving him in a bootleg alcohol operation. Drabinski throughout points up Adamski’s sense of dislocation in a new Poland he views with a wry disillusionment.

The challenges and stresses of coping in a newly capitalist Poland charge Jerzy Stuhr’s “A Week in the Life of a Man,” which closes the festival Tuesday at 9 p.m. This is an ambitious topical drama Stuhr wrote for himself. He plays a beefy, middle-aged public prosecutor of considerable renown whose life starts unraveling in the course of a week. Our hero faces the challenge of matching his private and public morality as his seriously overextended finances threaten to destroy him. He and his lovely, forthright wife (Gosia Dobrowolska, familiar from her appearances in Australian films) have decided on a trial adoption of a little boy without considering whether they are up to such responsibility given their demanding lives. Meanwhile, the prosecutor’s mother requires expensive treatment to combat an otherwise fatal malignancy. Stuhr piles on the adversities to convey the burdens of life under Communism, and illuminates the ills that affect all contemporary industrial societies.

In 1410 the resourceful Poles and Lithuanians decimated the haughty German hordes in a mighty battle on the grassy fields near Tannenberg. This bloody charge was brought to the wide screen in all its glory by veteran director Aleksander Ford in “Knights of the Teutonic Order” (Sunday at noon), a splendid 1960 spectacle in stunning color that is like a medieval tapestry come to life. (It almost certainly has not been screened locally in some 35 years.) This historic encounter culminates a majestic three-hour movie that is packed with romance, pageantry and palace intrigue. Ford blends a cast of 5,000, monumental sets, lavish costumes, beautiful scenery and a fine musical score to create an extraordinary entertainment, based on a novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz, Nobel Prize-winning author of “Quo Vadis?”

In achieving the elegiac tone of an epic poem, Ford has made a film that was virtually unique among the mammoth spectacles then current. Throughout, he carefully avoids the banality, gratuitous bloodshed and rampant vulgarity that characterize most movies of this type. His style is as sharp as the clang of a knight’s sword on his shield. Against a background of vast forests, enormous ancient castles and quaint villages, a handsome Polish knight, played by Mieczyslaw Kalenik, pursues the lovely Danushka, a member of the glittering court of the duchess of Masovia. This blond beauty (Grazyna Staniszewska) is soon kidnapped by the evil leader of the Order of the Teutonic Knights.

The enormous cast and endless plot complications make the story hard to follow despite subtitles. But audiences will be compensated for their concentration by a series of remarkable scenes that builds to the awesome final sequence, which is as impressive as the conclusion of Eisenstein’s “Alexander Nevsky.” Before the Polish nation’s ultimate victory, however, there are stretches of pastoral beauty and a lusty banquet in the monolithic crenelated red-brick castle of the Teutons. Inside this moated fortress, the German knights, who look like members of an early-day Ku Klux Klan in their white robes with big black crosses stitched across their chests, torture Danushka’s father, while their leader, a religious fanatic, paces through cavernous groined halls plotting the takeover of Polish lands.

The festival is also presenting Monday at 8 p.m. another film based on a Sienkiewicz novel, Jerzy Hoffman’s “With Fire and Sword” (1999), which was screened twice recently at the Monica 4-Plex. It is also a historical epic, a tempestuous romance set in the late 1640s along the border between Poland and the Ukraine, a site marked by a Cossack uprising that involved rivalries among Polish noblemen as well as Tartars and Turks eager to get a foothold in Europe. Although this film also has good subtitling and engaging, swashbuckling characters, awesome battle scenes, and gorgeous costumes and settings, it could use a special introduction and periodic English narration on the soundtrack to enable non-Polish-speaking audiences to see the context and to follow the narrative line through an exceptionally complicated plot.

What is clear enough is the intense rivalry between Sir Jan Skrzetuski (Michal Zebrowksi), a handsome young Polish colonel who is fighting the Cossacks, and his enemy, the ruthless Ukrainian Bohun (Alessander Domogarov), who have both fallen passionately in love with the beautiful Polish noblewoman Helena (Isabellea Scorupco). As much, if not more, time is spent on the adventures of three of Jan’s soldier pals, who carry on like the Three Musketeers: Zagloba (Kryzysztof Kowalewski), a beefy Falstaffian character with a knack for getting others to do his duties; Wolodyjowski (Zbigniew Zamachowski), an ace duelist; and the quixotic Longinus (Wiktor Zoborowski), who has sworn to preserve his virginity until he beheads three enemies with a single stroke of his sword. All these people and many others come alive vividly as appealing figures of humor and bravery. “With Fire and Sword,” a blockbuster on home ground, is zesty, stylish and would be completely captivating if we had a surer sense of what was going on. (818) 982-8827 or (310) 274-6869.

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Two new Sunset 5 Friday and Saturday midnight shows: Andrew Goth’s 1999 stylish and ultra-violent “Everybody Loves Sunshine” focuses on two fresh-out-of prison Manchester gangsters, one savagely psychotic (Goldie, the singular techno music star), the other eager to segue into music (Goth), while David Bowie plays the cool, ruthless leader of their gang in their absence; and Meir Zarchi’s 1978 exploitation picture, “I Spit on Your Grave,” an ultra-graphic tale of rape and revenge that some critics have taken far more seriously than you may want to. (323) 858-3500.