A Generation (1955) on Netflix
Warsaw, 1942. Stach survives by petty theft. After a friend dies stealing coal from a German train, he takes work in a furniture workshop, joins the resistance, and meets Dorota.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb7.1/103,341 votes
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Plot summary
Stach is a young man in German-occupied Warsaw in 1942, living in squalor on the city's edge and surviving by theft and small acts of rebellion. After a friend is killed trying to take coal from a German supply train, Stach finds work as an apprentice in a furniture workshop. There a journeyman, the secret communist Comrade Sekula, draws him into an underground cell and introduces him to Dorota, who leads the Organization of Youth Fighters. She asks him to form a small resistance group, and he brings in his friends Jacek and Mundek. Jasio Krone, a temperamental young man and the son of an elderly veteran, holds back from joining. Unknown to Stach, the workshop is also a hub for the Polish Underground Army.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Generation (1955)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- A Generation featured the first documented use of squibs to simulate bullet impacts, showing audiences a realistic bullet hitting a person with blood spatter. Effects creator Kazimierz Kutz used a condom filled with fake blood and dynamite for the effect.
- Because machine guns could not be adapted to fire blanks at the time, every shot of automatic weapons fire in A Generation was done with live ammunition fired into sandbags off-screen.
- The film is based on Bohdan Czeszko's autobiographical novel Pokolenie, which drew on his own activity in the armed resistance of the communist Polish Workers' Party against the Nazi occupation of Poland.
- A Polish film production executive objected to A Generation's brutal violence and to its hero being portrayed as a disaffected proletarian, but the film was approved for release anyway.
