Polish Anarchy

Eve Wants to Sleep (Film Polski; Edward Harrison) begins in a dark alley; a man is clubbed to the pavement and his briefcase stolen. So far, so bloody; then the thief walks a few steps down the alley, a gas pipe thuds musically on a skull, and the mugger himself lies mugged. The new thief happily examines the briefcase--until a knife glints in the uncertain light. He gives the loot to the latest blackguard, when suddenly . . .

Suddenly the viewer realizes that it is he who has been led up an alley. These Poles are up to something. As a jingling, bezithered theme song about crime without punishment gives evidence, the film is showing a previously unmapped neighborhood of that criminally comic never-city where Mack the Knife operates. Just now it is nightfall, and a pretty, innocently mischievous girl (Barbara Lass) has arrived at the city's School of Geodetics, ready to enroll. But the school cannot receive her till tomorrow, and out into the night she wanders.

She meets a sawed-off apprentice thug who wants her to buy a brick or he will conk her with it. She has no money, but takes the brick and, in innocence, offers it for the thug to a hysterical old man. A cop comes, the thug runs, she is led off to the station. There she panics, locks herself into what turns out to be the station arsenal. But the chief of police is coming for an inspection, and the door must be opened. A convict safecracker is summoned, dressed in a cop's uniform. The chief praises him for his honest face.

The solemn may try to see political satire in this jape. It is true that one of a pack of thieves says, "At least we're not nationalized yet," and an official-looking sign in a workingwomen's boardinghouse reads, "Chastity is the Best Policy! Don't See Your Husband." But the only real politics in this film is lunatic anarchy. Everyone mugs like mad, and if a sight gag falls flat, there is another along in ten seconds. It all serves as a reminder that the early-Hollywood, dead-run comedy used to be awfully funny, and it is pretty sneaky of the Poles to rediscover this fact.

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