Two Males Abristle

Knife in the Water begins against a feebly sunlit landscape in the lake region of Poland. A bored husband and wife are driving out for a day's sailing. They stop to pick up a brash young hitchhiker, whose insolence catalyzes their own hostility--and this three-cornered thriller quickly generates force. By the time they reach pierside, the two males are abristle, eying each other like cocks in a pit. "You're no match for me, but come aboard," taunts the older man. The boy accepts: "Ah, you want to carry on the game."

The game is an elemental struggle between the man who has it made (Leon Niemczyk) and the man who aches to make it (Zygmunt Malanowicz). Comfortably bourgeois, the husband flaunts his car, his boat, his radio, his sailing skill, his worldly outlook and his trimly bikini'd wife (Jolanta Umecka).* The young bohemian have-not counters with raw vitality and his skill with a virile-looking switchblade knife.

Accepting the limits of action offered by only three characters aboard one small sloop, Director Roman Polanski sends his inquisitive camera whirring from port to starboard, bow to stern, up the mast. He shoots over shoulders and behind heads, composing frame after intimate frame through which his unholy trinity inevitably reveal themselves. Every twitch of an eyelid tells a small, stinging truth. Man, woman and boy abrade one another until a climactic fight for possession of the knife abruptly exposes the very quick of character. Despising her husband, in his absence the cool young wife gives herself to the boy, dryly observing: "You're just like him--only half his age, weaker and more stupid." In a cruel final scene, as husband and wife head homeward, the man pulls his car up to a crossroad, immobilized by circumstances and the contradictions of his own nature, literally asking himself which way to turn. The camera pulls back to watch the car squatted there, frozen in time, unforgettable, a frail heap of nuts and bolts suddenly alive with one man's pride, guilt, confusion and despair.

* Pictured with Actor Malanowicz on TIME'S Sept. 20 cover: "A Religion of Film."

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