Polish Variations

Eroica, made in 1957 by Polish Director Andrzej Munk, who died in a 1961 auto crash, reaches the U.S. with a reputation as a classic. But Munk's film stands up less well than Ozu's under the glare of posthumous appraisal. It looks like a roughing out of the masterwork that it was meant to be--one angry young Pole's bitter, blackly comic jeer at wartime myths of courage and honor.

Munk started out to make a trilogy but for some reason had to pare Eroica down to the less esthetic form of a double episode. The first, or scherzo, movement begins during the disastrous Warsaw uprising of 1944, when Polish patriots attacked their German oppressors, expecting aid from Russian forces that lay watchfully beyond the Vistula until the city was destroyed. In this film, the reluctant Reds are pretty much ignored. Munk's antihero (Edward Dziewonski) is a self-seeking womanizer who cynically boasts that he survived the occupation by "buying and selling." He shares his easy-to-bed wife (Barbara Polomska) with an enemy Hungarian officer, learns that the fleeing Hungarians will lend men and guns to help the Polish Home Army. Before the Poles refuse, the drunken, don't-give-a-damn patriot hustles messages back and forth, so ludicrous a target that a thundering German tank blasts him only with derision. At one point, he joins a long line of evacuees and is forced to shoulder household goods for a peasant woman, a greedy "old bitch" who makes him buy the stuff to get rid of it.

The second part of the film, set in a German prison camp for Polish officers, is unrelated except as another microcosm of a nation brooding over defeat in a state of moral and spiritual collapse. The inmates cling to the fiction that during five long years just one heroic officer has escaped. Actually, he is a tuberculous wreck, coughing his life away in an attic hiding place overhead. The only truly noble officer so despises his fellow prisoners that he spends most of his time in the isolation of a large makeshift box, reading.

Though rich in startling, unsentimental detail, Eroica's disillusioned view of history never comes to wider focus upon a compelling character or a whole truth. Against the background of Poland in 1957, however, its very ambiguity is provocative--partly an elegy for individualism, partly an indictment of a people destined to trade old masters for new.

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