“Extraordinary”: the movie Francis Ford Coppola calls his all-time favourite
Only a fool would argue that Francis Ford Coppola has not delivered some of the most important pieces of American cinema throughout his magnificent career. Naturally, there have been a handful of missteps along the way, but for the most part, Coppola’s catalogue is sheer quality.
Of course, the likes of his masterpiece crime epic The Godfather and his striking Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now immediately come to mind, but elsewhere, the legendary director has released several other acclaimed works, including The Conversation, Rumble Fish and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
As such, many of Coppola’s movies have invariably become cinephiles’ favourites, but the director himself is no stranger to enjoying a movie from the perspective of the audience and has previously expressed his admiration for some of the truly great works of the medium over the years.
For instance, as per Sight and Sound, we know that Coppola loves the work of Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese and William Wyler. However, as far as his favourite movie of all time goes, that distinction goes to the 1958 Polish drama Ashes and Diamonds, directed by Andrzej Wajda.
“That’s fabulous. It’s a beautiful movie,” Coppola had once stated. “It was an extraordinary movie for many reasons. It’s less known than it should be, but it’s a beauty.” Ashes and Diamonds is based on the 1948 novel of the same name by Jerzy Andrzejewski and tells of a former Home Army soldier who receives an order to kill the local secretary of the Polish Workers Party for the anti-Communists but begins to wonder whether he should go ahead with his task.
The protagonist, Maciek Chelmicki, was played by Zbigniew Cybulski, who Coppola compared to James Dean in the fact that both were huge talents who died in tragic circumstances. “He was the James Dean of the time, and like James Dean, he died young in a train accident,” Coppola explained.
Indeed, Cybulski died at the age of 39, having played a number of rebellious characters in the likes of Ashes and Diamonds, Night Train and Innocent Sorcerers. “He was a very charismatic, wonderful actor,” Coppola said. “It’s always a tragedy when these actors die young because you wonder what would have been. What would they have given? He was a unique, wonderful actor.”
Coppola was not the only American cinema icon to pay his respects to Cybulski and Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, though, as Martin Scorsese is another director who considers the film one of his favourites of all time. The Mean Streets and Goodfellas director first saw Ashes and Diamonds back in 1961 and admitted to being “shocked” by it.
“The film has the power of a hallucination: I can close my eyes, and certain images will flash back to me with the force they had when I saw them for the first time over 50 years ago,” Scorsese explained, proving the kind of power that Wajda had in impressing some of the greatest American directors of all time.
Ashes and Diamonds is rightfully considered one of the greatest movies ever made in Poland. When it appeared at the Venice Film Festival, it duly won the FIPRESCI award and went on to become a stone-cold favourite of Coppola and Scorsese.
