Andrzej Wajda’s 1957 film Kanal tells the story very vividly: September 1944—the citizens of Warsaw are eight weeks into their valiant, if somewhat foolhardy, uprising against the Third Reich. If the resistance fighters can only hold out until the Soviet force massed just outside the city come to their rescue...but wait! The Red Army chooses this time to sort its sock drawers, do some laundry, catch up on back episodes of The Sopranskis, freeing the Hun to put paid to the Poles in job lots. What rotten luck! The film follows a dead-ender band of partisans as they dodge the Krauts, retreating finally to the insalubrious environment of the Warsaw sewers, which make Orson Welles’ desperate flight at the end of The Third Man look like a stroll through a semiconductor “clean room.”

cordially,