Kanał (1957, Andrzej Wajda) (Patreon)

68/100

Second viewing, last seen 1995. I remembered it as taking place almost entirely in the sewers, and was quite surprised to find everyone still above ground at nearly the midpoint—not a complaint, really, as Warsaw's ruins are no less disturbingly atmospheric (especially when you reflect upon Wajda having had no difficulty finding suitable locations, fully a dozen years after Nazis destroyed the city purely out of spite). Still, it's wounded and weary resistance fighters moving incrementally down dark, dank tunnels—those are constructed sets, remarkably—that makes this a classic of the genre, along with the film's truly pitiless worldview. America eventually got around to producing some ugly portraits of the Vietnam War, but only once we collectively agreed that our presence there was a mistake; to the best of my knowledge, nobody has significant moral misgivings about the Warsaw Uprising, and 1957 was awfully soon to depict it, however accurately, as a hopeless failure, with Wajda declining even to make its heroes particularly heroic (though the final shot is equal parts valor and futility). A few melodramatic, movie-ish interludes undermine the bracing bleakness: One character—a musician, coded as extra-sensitive; he also quotes Dante's Inferno at one point, lest we fail to recognize that we're in hell—very abruptly "goes mad," as if someone had accidentally flipped his catatonia switch, and the sequence that generates suspense from an effort to defuse three grenades whilst standing on a slippery rock, admittedly orchestrated with near-Hitchcockian flair, feels a tad glib in this grim context. Still, the subterranean clamminess seeps in, and almost everyone onscreen emerges from it into harsh, blazing light that reveals still greater gloom. Rough stuff.