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Sheybal) gets in touch with his family, who are elsewhere in the city. Panicked,
she shares that the Germans are in her building and are coming to take her, and
then she is cut off. The next day, Officer Cadet Jacek “Korab” (Tadeusz Janczar)
happens upon the second- in- command, Lt. Mądry (Emil Karewicz), in bed with a
local messenger girl. After apologizing, the officers go to battle against the Ger-
mans. While they hold them off, Korab is shot and wounded while cutting the
guide wire of a Goliath tracked mine (a remote- controlled miniature tank full of
explosives) with a shovel. With his platoon now down to 27 and covered on all
sides by the Germans, Zadra is commanded to take to the sewers in order to
retreat. Stokrotka (Polish for “Daisy”) (Teresa Izewska), their guide, asks Zadra to
permit her to help Korab. Zadra gives his consent but Stokrotka and Korab soon
get separated from the group. Korab’s injuries have weakened him, and he is
forced to rest before climbing up to the street. Stokrotka then directs them toward
the river, and they see rays of sunlight ahead. Korab, extremely weak and near
blind, is unable to see that the pair’s exit is blocked by metal bars. Stokrotka con-
fesses her love for Korab while they rest and regroup. Meanwhile, the rest of the
group gets lost, as they haven’t had Stokrotka to guide them. Zadra attempts to
command Sgt. Kula (Tadeusz Gwiazdowski) to move the troops forward, but they
refuse. Zadra and Kula lose all of their men except the mechanic, Smukły (Stani-
slaw Mikulski). The men who have not followed Zadra and Kula get lost again and
eventually end up dead or captured. Zadra, Kula, and Smukły encounter a sewer
exit but it is booby-trapped by German grenades. Smukły is only able to disarm two
of the three grenades; the third one explodes, killing him. Zadra and Kula fi nally
come up from the sewer to an abandoned and bombed- out part of the city. When
Kula admits that he left the other men behind, Zadra kills him and returns to the
sewers to find them.
Reception
Released in Poland on 20 May 1957, Kanał was a punishing but ultimately cathar-
tic experience for those who had lived through the terrible, tragic events it depicts.
In the words of film critic and Warsaw Uprising survivor Stanislaw Grzelecki, “The
tragedy of the people who believed to the very end that the fight they had under-
taken [was] right has found disturbing expression in Wajda’s film. The drama
assumes a shape of a meta phor, all the more meaningful because its ordinary heroes
have been, for many years, forced into the shadows, into silence, to endure the mud-
slinging, false accusations and slander” (Grzelecki, 1957). Other Polish critics, not
as understanding as Grzelecki, initially panned the film for its unheroic grimness.
Kanał was screened in competition at the 10th Cannes Film Festival (May 1957),
where it shared the Special Jury Prize with Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and
received rave notices from French film critics, international recognition that
prompted a more positive reassessment at home. Released in the United States in
1961, the film briefly ran in a few art house cinemas. Bosley Crowther found Kanał
as “dismal, dark and depressing a drama of events in World War II as this reviewer
has yet witnessed” (Crowther, 1961).