The life-story of representative Pole, from the 1930s to the 1950s told by its "hero" who is seeking sympathy and not wanting to leave the only place he has been happy. If the Polish version really is an hour longer it probably doesn't make much difference to the film's tone, for it is all One Damn Thing After Another. The hero's position is ambiguous: he looks like a jew but isn't one, he slides between middle and working class as is convenient, he bows to authority at once, he wants to be a hero but isn't one- typically Polish perhaps! For example, he dresses in another man's officer's uniform and is captured at once by the Germans, in prison camp he continues the pretence and is taken for a stool-pigeon. One of the film's aspects is the way his lies and false claims of heroism get him into trouble that even his own small acts of real heroism can't get him out of. Everything that happens, he tells his silhouetted listener, wasn't really his fault. After the war we see his bad side come out- in Stalin's Poland he denounces his colleagues and superiors and they frame him in turn. At the end we learn that Piszczyk is about to be thrown out of prison- it is the one place he has been happy with the one sympathetic listener he has found. Even so, reluctantly, obediently, he is thrown out and leaves. In a British film this would be a Norman Wisdom character perhaps; in the US Danny Kaye. However, here the tone is harsher, we don't have sympathy for Piszczyk for long. where Wisdom's or Kaye's characters are fundamentally decent Piszczyk is often contemptible- as bad as his enemies and rivals. Technically, it's very well-done, a combination of sight-gags and bitter verbal humour with surreal and farcical elements.
Review of Bad Luck
