Kanał (Zespol Filmowy “Kadr,” 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The first film I watched last night on Turner Classic Movies was a 1957 Polish production called Kanał (notice the diacritical slash through the terminal “l”), whose title is the Polish word for “Sewer.” It was the second film directed by Andrzej Wajda, and also the second in his “World War II Trilogy” after A Generation and followed by the movie that really made his international reputation, Ashes and Diamonds. It’s loosely based on a true story: in August 1944 citizens of Warsaw decided to rise up against their Nazi occupiers and mounted a futile two-month resistance campaign which ended, all too predictably, with their mass slaughter at the hands of the Nazis. The campaign had been O.K.’d by the provisional Polish government in exile in London, but had not been cleared with the Soviet Union, Britain’s nominal allies and the country that would essentially take over Poland after the war ended. Kanał takes place in late September, during the last days of the Warsaw Uprising, and deals with a unit of 43 soldiers and civilian volunteers commanded, more or less (the unspeakable conditions under which they were fighting made it virtually impossible for the nominal authorities to maintain discipline), by Lieutenant Zadra (Wienszyslaw Gliniski). By then the Uprising has been crushed in most of the districts of Warsaw and the rebels are down to just three neighborhoods, including one called Mokotów. The unit in the movie has received orders to evacuate Mokotów and retreat to downtown, the last part of Warsaw that has not yet been recaptured by the Nazi occupiers. But only 27 of Zadra’s 43 men are fit to travel. Among the troops are Ensign Korab (Tadeusz Janczar); Lieutenant Madry (Emil Karewicz); Daisy (Teresa Izewska), the blonde-haired guide with whom he’s fallen in love in what has got to be the most bizarre “meet-cute” in movie history; Halinka (Teresa Berezowska), the other woman in the dramatis personae, who’s butch and dark-haired; and the man I thought was the film’s most interesting character, a would-be composer named Michal (Wladyslaw Sheybal).

A narrator (Tadeusz Lomnicki) who introduces the characters off-screen and fortunately isn’t heard from again matter-of-factly informs us that none of these people will still be alive by the end of the day, though quite frankly that’s not that big a surprise. The sense of doom that hangs over the film is its most palpable aspect; that and how vividly Wajda dramatizes the truly awful conditions under which the insurgents have to make their escape attempt. They literally have to wade through shit to get through the sewers and hopefully find an opening, only every time they do either their way is barred by a grille or German soldiers are waiting for them when they come out. In one chilling scene we see some of the escapees emerge and get confronted by a man in a uniform, and just when we’re wondering, “Friend or foe?,” Wajda shows us the SS logo on his arm and we know he’s foe and they’re in for an on-the-spot execution. Kanał is a grim film, as befits the subject matter, and in one scene Smukly (Stanislaw Mikulski), one of the insurgents, successfully disarms two German hand grenades hanging from the ceiling as booby traps but is blown to bits by a third one. It ends with Zadra shooting one of his own men, Sergeant Kula (Tadeuz Gwiadowski), for having lied to him; he said the others were right behind them and not, as the truth was, that they’d left them behind hours before. After Zadra kills Kula, he descends back into the sewers to look for his men ¬– and the film abruptly ends.

Kanał began life as a story called “They Loved Life” by Jerzy Stefan Stawinski, a real-life survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, and it was released (no surprise here!) in the middle of a fraught political climate in Poland. Wajda had previously released his first film, A Generation, also about the Polish experience during World War II but one with a considerably more sympathetic depiction of the Russians than this one. In between the two movies, Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev had personally denounced his predecessor, Josef Stalin, at the 1956 Communist Party Congress in Moscow. Suddenly it was now safe for writers and filmmakers in Eastern Bloc countries to mount less than hagiographic depictions of the Russians in general and Stalin in particular in stories set during World War II. A Polish critic named Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz acknowledged the political tightrope Wajda was walking with this movie: “Like all artists approaching this subject, Wajda has succumbed to certain pressures. On the one hand there was the rational pressure against delivering an apologia for the Rising and, on the other hand, the emotional pressure against taking a merciless criticism of the Rising. The film stopped halfway.” Though the Soviet-backed government of Poland didn’t allow direct criticism of Russia’s role in the war, one critic said, “They could not censor the silence” – the chilling moment in the film in which the partisan rebels expect to be rescued by the Soviet army, and instead they hear only silence as the Soviet forces stop firing. Wajda originally wanted to begin the film with a montage of similar doomed attempts at resistance throughout Polish history, including the Napoleonic era’s Battle of Samosierra, the Charge of Rokitna in World War I, and the legend of the Charge at Krojanty, reputedly on German tanks in 1939. While he abandoned that plan, I suspect because including all those scenes would have blown his budget, Wajda’s biographer, Boleslaw Michalek, wrote, “Wajda’s treatment of the Warsaw Rising and the retreat through the sewers had a definite and deliberate historical and social edge.”

The result was a movie that frequently reminded me of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” another testament to individual heroism within the context of an absolutely stupid, hopeless, and pointless battle. It’s not surprising that on its initial release Kanał was unpopular with Polish audiences and critics because it depicted presumed national heroes literally wading through shit. Kanał is an impressive movie but also a quite grim one, and one of the most chilling sets of scenes occur when the Polish would-be escapees are convinced that the Germans are flooding the sewer tunnels with poison gas, but it turns out to be just the natural by-products of the decay of the human waste and other garbage in the sewer tunnels. One of the weirder parts of World War II was that Adolf Hitler, who himself had been the victim of a poison gas attack during World War I, strictly forbade the German armed forces from using it in World War II. Of course he had no problem using gas to kill millions of innocent and helpless civilians in the extermination centers as part of the Holocaust, but Hitler didn’t want any of his troops to suffer the way he had in the preceding war. Another neat part of the movie is Michal’s quoting passages from Dante’s Inferno describing the descent into hell as the partisans make their own descent into the sewers – a reference Wajda acknowledged was deliberate on his part. As biographer Michalek wrote, “Kanał is permeated by a virtually unrelieved mood of despair, bitterness and resignation. The whole structure is pivoted on the idea that there is no way out, no hope, no chance of deliverance. As in Dante, there is only a succession of narrowing circles of torment.” This makes it ironic in the extreme that both this and the next film shown on Turner Classic Movies May 9, the Italian film Salvatore Giuliano, were intense dramas with no (or virtually no) comic-relief elements – and yet the showings were co-hosted by TCM regular Ben Mankiewicz and Bill Hader, who’s prlmarily known as a comedian. The ironies got even more intense when Hader acknowledged that he’d ripped off Kanał for the opening of the second season of one of his comedy mini-series!