Pair from Poland

Ashes and Diamonds (Film Polski; Janus) is an honest, brutally powerful and often shocking effort to dramatize a question posed by the 19th century Polish poet Norwid: Will the ashes from the flames of war "hold the glory of a starlike diamond"? As such, it becomes a sort of Poland Man Amour, in which love, out of the cinders of World War II, is kindled anew, flickers with the fire of diamonds, burns out finally in a coda of death.

When the story opens, Nazi Germany has just capitulated, and into the dawn of peace, in a provincial Polish town, come two armed patriots with orders from resistance headquarters to assassinate the newly arrived Communist district secretary. When they mistakenly gun down two innocents, doubt sets in: Can there be any real justification for continued bloodletting? After one of the patriots, Maciek (attractively played by "the Polish Jimmy Dean," Zbigniew Cybulski), enjoys a vividly photographed tumble with a sullenly beautiful barmaid, he decides to say farewell to arms, hello to love and possibly life in a university. But the past plays harshly on the present. Maciek is humiliated by charges of desertion and carries out his orders to kill. In the end, he dies horribly and senselessly, as if to say that death in itself is never heroic.

Director Andrzej Wajda displays more concern with people than ideas, with the emotions of his heroes than with the symbols of any system. His style is disjunctive and expressionistic, but it is also clear and direct. With a fluid, strikingly graphic technique, he achieves some memorable metaphors: the mad, drunken celebration of victory to Chopin's Polonaise in A Major; the ironic reflection of V-E day fireworks in a stagnant pool, beside which the Communist boss lies dead; the lovers in a ruined church, its Christ figure splintered and dangling upside down in the foreground; Maciek setting fire to each glass of vodka on a bar and delivering weird incantations to old, dead loves; his girl drenched in sunlight while Maciek--in the death throes on a dank rubbish heap--whimpers and twitches like a wounded rabbit.

Kanal (Film Polski; Frankel-MJ.P.) is a cruel catalogue of the psychological terrors and physical tortures of trapped men. Almost the entire story takes place in the kanaly, the filthy, fetid sewers that coursed like petrified entrails through German-occupied Warsaw. It is September 1944, the final days of the Uprising, and the ragged remnants of a guerrilla company--waging a fruitless small-arms fight against Nazi tanks--are ordered to retreat underground. There, in sewage, they panic, drown, go mad, get lost, commit suicide and make love.

All exits are either barricaded or booby-trapped. A rumor of gas causes mass hysteria. A simple cough is like a thunderbolt that brings on a rain of German grenades. A classical pianist plays a melancholy tune on his sweet-potato pipe and quotes Dante's Inferno as his mind ebbs away "in the lake's foul bottom, plunged in dung"--a grim elegy that unites all their fates. A sentient lover (Tadeusz Janczar) pretends "we're walking in a dark and fragrant wood," but his blonde, tough-minded mistress (Teresa Izewska) shatters the illusion tersely: "We're walking in [obscenity]." The lovers' goal is to reach the sewer's outlet in the Vistula; when they do, a grid of iron bars blocks them. Still the hero, who has lost none of his heart-rending hope, can say: "Daisy, the sun is shining."

The final image is an evocation of the inevitability of death for Polish heroes as interpreted by Andrzej Wajda, who also directed this film. The insurrectionist leader (Wieczyslaw Glinski) pokes his grimy head through a manhole, headed toward freedom. But when he hears from his sergeant that the men he thought were close behind have gone astray, he kills the sergeant as a betrayer and slowly descends once more into the offal that seals his doom.

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