If we are lucky in our youth we will meet someone whose tale of woe, of rotten luck, of good work gone for nothing reveals itself to be a consequence of self-absorbed indifference to the true lives of others.

Piszczyk tells his own story. At the outset we know he is in prison and wants to stay there. For the 108 minutes (in the Polart DVD) of Munk's farce, Piszczyk, a Harry Langdon character for all Munk's chaplinesquerie, unwittingly persuades us his bad luck is a direct consequence of his moral cowardice. From his childhood in prewar, protofascist Poland through middle age in Stalinist Poland, he hasn't a clue beyond his own immediate safety and gratification.

Piszczyk stumbles through the worst atrocities of European history without compassion, encountering the Good and the Bad, the Noble and the Ignoble, oblivious to consequence, ready to be used indiscriminately by anyone who offers him any form of reward. The sooner in life we meet such people the better our chances of escaping their fate.

Most importantly, Munk makes us laugh at him, monster though he is.

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.

The tone of the humor in this remarkable film (a delicious treat for any aficionados of central European cinema, especially),is remarkably like some Ealing comedies I've seen ...'Kind Hearts and Coronets' and 'The Lavender Hill Mob', come readily to mind. The director must have seen a bit of American slapstick & french farce, of the 1920's-30's, or at least digested a few choice examples to elaborate upon. Not wanting to give away the plot,or try to define the movie in any tangible way, I find myself at a loss for words. See for yourself, it's to unique to risk selling short by focusing on Favorite Scenes, or trying to figure where it stands in relation to Polish cinema as a whole. I don't recall feeling so turned on my head, and disoriented by a comedy, since Kon Ichikawai's 'Fires on the Plain'.