The first of Andrzej Wajda's trilogy of films on the Polish Resistance
Just twenty years ago there took place one of the most tragically gallant episodes in the sad and glorious history of the Polish people. This was the Warsaw rising of August, 1944, in which the ill-armed soldiers of the Underground Army rose against their German rulers. Russian armies were at hand, and the Poles hoped to hand over a free city to the 'liberators'; but for political reasons Stalin ordered his troops to offer no help, so the rising was defeated and bloodily punished.
The insurrection was the climax of the work of the Polish resistance, and Andrzej Wajda has chronicled the history of the movement in his notable trilogy consisting of A Generation, Kanal (to be shown next week), and Ashes and Diamonds (August 26). The first of these, to be re-screened tonight, deals with the early stirrings of resistance. The year is 1942, and in a shanty town outside Warsaw a group of workless youths pass their time with acts of minor sabotage, such as stealing lumps of coal from German supply trains.
This idle game turns to tragedy when one day one of the youths is shot dead. Another, named Stach, is wounded and comes to realise that resistance is a serious affair; and from then on the film traces his development from an irresponsible adolescent into a disciplined partisan and member of a Youth Fighters Group.
Wajda has drawn fine performances from his actors, who include Tadeusz Lomnicki as Stach, and Urszula Modrzynska as Dorota, the girl resistance leader into whose band Stach is recruited.