Polish Cinema Classics

After the horrors of the Nazi occupation and repressive postwar Soviet domination, Polish cinema suddenly took off in the mid-50s to become a major international force. Initially, it was Andrzej Wajda's trilogy (1954-58) on wartime resistance that attracted attention. That was followed by a wave of films approaching contemporary society with skilful circumspection before there was a further clampdown in the late 1960s. The four films in this well-documented box set are all first-rate. Only Andrzej Munk's Eroica (1957), a black comedy in two parts (one about spiv caught up with the resistance, the other set in a concentration camp) takes place during the war. Both Wajda's acutely observed Innocent Sorcerers (1960), about a newly qualified, jazz-loving doctor and his problems with emotional commitment, and Janusz Morgenstern's little-known, loosely knit Goodbye, See You Tomorrow (1960), about a young stage director falling for a visiting French beauty, centre on disaffected youth. The fourth, Jerzy Kawalerowicz's Night Train (1959), is an accomplished psychological thriller set entirely on a train carrying a cross-section of Poles from Warsaw to the Baltic coast. The last three feature the charismatic Zbigniew Cybulski, star of Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds . Dubbed Poland's James Dean, he was killed in a 1967 railway accident.