‘Ashes and Diamonds’: The Polish movie championed by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola
Having made a frankly ludicrous number of cinema’s greatest-ever movies between them, when Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola say that a Polish drama is one of the best films in history, it’s impossible to disagree.
The Italian-American icons rose through the ranks at the same time and didn’t hang around gaining attention as two of their generation’s brightest talents. Even into their 80s, the dynamic duo are still going strong and yelling at clouds over the current state of the industry, and it’s hard to begrudge them, looking at all they’ve achieved.
Coppola has five Academy Awards to his name from 14 nominations, is the brains behind the Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now, refused to let the fact he went bankrupt limit his creative ambitions, and has pulled off yet another monumental gambit by footing the bill for $120million dystopian sci-fi Megalopolis.
Scorsese, meanwhile, is somehow still operating at the top of his game, with his paltry return of a solitary Oscar from 17 nominations hardly reflective of his status as an all-timer who continues to prove that age is just a number when he’s carried on knocking out classic after classic more than 50 years removed from his first.
In short, when these titans say that something is among the cream of the crop, then it is. Influential Polish director Andrzej Wajda crafted several masterpieces of his own, but his 1958 adaptation of Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel Ashes and Diamonds is arguably his magnum opus, and a staggering achievement in cinema that reaches such an artistic peak that even the legends themselves are forced to bow down.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II and with the Germans having surrendered, Russian forces work with Polish resistance fighters to figure out the new hierarchy of power. Zbigniew Cybulski’s local assassin is ordered to take out Waclaw Zastrzezynsky’s foreign soldier, but he struggles with his assignment after they’d been fighting side-by-side in pursuit of the same goal just days before.
For Coppola, Ashes and Diamonds is a “beautiful movie” that he named as being his favourite, even if he thinks a feature that exists as “an extraordinary movie for many reasons” is “less known than it should be” among the average cinephile. Fortunately, Scorsese definitely is not the average cinephile, and he holds the film in equally high regard.
Describing it – in a positive sense – as “a nightmare that won’t stop unfolding”, with his first encounter leaving him “astonished”. The auteur pointed to its “sense of maddening insanity and absurdity, the tragedy of political infighting on the brink of peace and coming of age during wartime, and the beauty of the lead actor, Zbigniew Cybulski” as just some of the reasons why Ashes and Diamonds has always stuck with him, and his contemporary Coppola is in the exact same boat.
