Ashes and Diamonds (1958) on Netflix
In 1945 Poland, Maciek Chełmicki, a former Home Army soldier, is ordered to kill Konrad Szczuka, a local party secretary. At the Hotel Monopol he meets the barmaid Krystyna.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.7/1015,225 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
In May 1945, with the war in Europe ending, Maciek Chełmicki, Andrzej and Drewnowski, former soldiers of the Home Army, wait near a country church to kill Konrad Szczuka, a party secretary. They shoot the wrong car, and two people die. Their superior, Major Waga, orders them to try again. At the Hotel Monopol restaurant a banquet marks the victory; the two men sit in the bar and remember fallen comrades over glasses of burning spirit. Drewnowski gets drunk at the bar and talks with Pieniążek, a newspaper man, about his prospects in postwar Poland. Maciek talks with Krystyna, a barmaid, and asks her up to his room.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Ashes and Diamonds (1958)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Andrzej Wajda considered Tadeusz Janczar for the role of Maciek Chełmicki, but his assistant director Janusz Morgenstern, who knew the acting market better, encouraged him to cast Zbigniew Cybulski instead.
- Zbigniew Cybulski arrived on set and refused to wear the partisan uniform costume designer Katarzyna Chodorowicz had suggested for Maciek, insisting instead on his own 1950s dark glasses, jacket and tight jeans.
SPOILER
The script kept changing during the shoot: Cybulski suggested that Szczuka should hold the dying Maciek, Wajda added scenes with Christian iconography, and Janusz Morgenstern invented the film's most widely known scene, in which Maciek and Andrzej light glasses of rectified spirit.- Party intellectuals objected to Maciek Chełmicki being the film's main character, and it was only Jerzy Andrzejewski, backed by fellow writers, convincing PZPR activists that the film's ideological message was correct that got Ashes and Diamonds released at all.
- Aleksander Ford demanded that the authorities ban the film, yet its official premiere went ahead on 3 October 1958; Poland then blocked it from the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival over continuing doubts about its message.
- Ashes and Diamonds was shot in the 1:1.85 format, a ratio that had never been used before in Polish cinema.
- Former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters said the film had an "enormous impact" on him as a young man, and the band's 1983 song "Two Suns in the Sunset", from the album The Final Cut, refers to it.
- In a 2024 Letterboxd interview, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio named Ashes and Diamonds as one of their core inspirations for their 2006 Academy-Award winning film The Departed.
