Ziemia obiecana
Tags: historical

Plot synopsis:
The film opens following two American high school acquaintances a few years after graduation now suffering from deep anger and anguish because they are not as successful as they hoped to be. Hancock (Jason Gedrick) is the high school basketball star who gets into college on an athletic scholarship only to lose the scholarship to a better player. Unable to succeed in college based on his academic merit, he returns to his hometown, becomes a police officer and is slowly moving into a middle-class mediocrity with his cheerleader girlfriend, Mary, who is in college and plans to major in the arts. Hancock is still stewing over the fact that he is no longer the sports star and that his girlfriend is not only reluctant to marry him but may end up being more successful than he.
Danny (Kiefer Sutherland) is the academic "nerd" who was supposedly destined to be so successful that he earned the nickname "Senator". It was felt by some that one day he would become a decent and just politician. He has returned home with his unrestrained, unpredictable, overbearing bride, Bev (Meg Ryan).
After a quick Christmas Eve reunion with his parents, Danny learns that his father is dying. He is unable to accept that while he left town with great expectations, he has returned a poor drifter. His desire to run from his problems again, however, prompts Bev to mock his manhood in front of some of his high school friends at a bar and the two decide to hold up a convenience store perhaps as a means for Danny to prove his manhood or because that is just what "Hollywood white trash" would do.
Just then, Hancock, unaware that Danny has returned to town, drives into the store's parking lot arguing with his girlfriend about the future of their relationship. Interrupting the robbery, he fatally shoots Danny and wounds Bev. Hancock then suffers something of an emotional breakdown. Danny and Hancock are shown to really have little in common except that Danny once had a crush on Mary and perhaps a repressed crush on Hancock.
As other police officers and paramedics arrive on scene, Hancock drives with his girlfriend to an open field where he had previously shared, with his police partner, some of his frustrations. He screams to Mary how he feels he has been lied to while growing up. Later Hancock has to personally inform Danny's father that he has killed his son.

Review: This definitely may be Andrzej Wajda's most introspective and interesting film.
The plot grabs you with its humour and depth while Wajda makes magic with the camera.
The Kurowo scene with the poppy flowers is classic...the music calls on nostalgia.
Olbrychski as the scrupleless, handsome Pole...Pszoniak as the hillarious, clever Jew...and (my favourite!) Seweryn as the baby-faced, love-struck German.
And let's remember that Wajda was one of the most liberated of all the filmmakers of the Soviet bloc.
Many regard this as Wajda's, and maybe even Poland's best ever film.
This is quite possibly the most exciting film I've ever seen.
The drama, wit and ferocity of the bulk of the film build so, so effectively to its deafening crescendo, the music, the setting, the actors and the camera-work complementing and intertwining with each other in a way quite possibly unmatched in anything else I've seen.
This is Wajda's demonstration that however much he may be portrayed as a hero of Poland's rebellion against its socialist regime, he is at the same time sympathetic to the cause which drove Marxism, and hostile to the vulgarities of the interaction of man and money, the dehumanising, reifying assault with which rampant capitalism engages with the human psyche.
If this is propaganda, then it is a heartfelt, stunningly effective damasking of the myth with which we all live today.By the way, I've only seen the re-released version, shorter than the original.
I think the freshness and crispness of the cinematography in the more recent version might have added to the film..
"The Promised Land" is a visual feast, fast-paced, and every bit as ruthless as the cutthroat characters it depicts.
The topic – the Industrial Revolution, and the characters – immoral greedy monsters – are ugly and mean, but Wajda's filmmaking is so virtuosic you watch just for the sheer craft, splendor, and runaway train of a plot.
I find it hard to sit through movies where there are no sympathetic main characters and no possibility of a happy ending, but "The Promised Land" is addictively watchable.
There's an orgy, a tiger, several mutilated bodies, fires, riots, history, and Wojciech Kilar's driving, award-winning score.Anyone interested in the Industrial Revolution should see this movie.
In the DVD's extra features, an assistant director discusses a scene of indigent paupers receiving charity food.
There is a lengthy scene where Anna (Anna Nehrebecka), a country aristocrat, travels to the city.
The camera follows Anna and lays out Lodz before her in all its gritty, noxious detail: smoking chimneys, workers' funerals, fighting men, the Jewish quarter.
The scene looks like documentary footage of a late nineteenth-century industrial city."The Promised Land" also takes the viewer into the mansions of Lodz, almost ridiculous in their sumptuousness, plunked down in so much filth, squalor, and despair.
Ornate winding staircases, gilt-encrusted columns and ceiling murals lure on industrialists willing to wring every last penny from their desperate employees."The Promised Land" depicts Lodz's emergence as a textile manufacturing hub.
Three friends, one a Polish aristocrat, one a Jew, and one a German, strive to build their own factory.
He's just an actor playing a part, he reminds us, as they all are, playing any part they want to get their highest ideal: cash.The film also depicts workers and their plight.
This is the price poor people pay for bread, the film shows us.
Just like Lodz, just like men chasing cash, just like history.There are a few characters who aren't utterly despicable.
There is a stunning scene that is quite different from anything else in the film.
The film moves quickly and purposefully, but in this scene men meet in a small room to play classical music.
The scene seems to say, "Yes, people in Lodz had souls." That reminder makes the surrounding greed-induced frenzy all the more disturbing.Some viewers protest "The Promised Land" as an anti-Semitic film, because of unpleasant Jewish characters.
Indeed, there are unpleasant Jewish characters in the film.
Virtually *every* character in the film is unpleasant – even the pretty, innocent child lured into prostitution.
Further, every character is unpleasant in an ethnically- gender-, and socioeconomic-class-coded way.
This film isn't anti-Semitic; it is brutally misanthropic.
It depicts people at their worst.Again, it is Wajda's virtuosic filmmaking that makes all this endurable.
That rock means much – the inevitable march of history that has brought industrialists high and might also bring them very, very low.
Wajda films this scene with such skill and poetry that the rock becomes a character in the film.
Subsequent action is filmed *from the rock's point of view.* Poland is a small, distant, and much contested country.
It's filmmaking like that that amply earned Wajda his honorary Academy Award..
By many (including me) seen as the best polish movie ever made.
The main characters: polish, german and jewish represent the three societies living in the industrial city of Lodz.
The time is the 1890s and the place is Lodz, Poland (which, Wikipedia indicates was a client state of the Russian Empire then).
Lodz at the time was a center of textile production, nicknamed "The Promised Land." Director Wajda wastes no time in hitting you over the head with the basic theme which is the total contrast between the industrial workers and the textile factory owners.
The main images we get of the workers is their crowding to get into work at the factories (ala scenes from "Metropolis") and working at their tedious work stations.
The main focus of the film is on the factory owners and wannabes and, in particular, on three friends who are wanting to build a factory--one of the friends is German, another is a Polish aristocrat, and the third is a Jew of a nationality that I never determined.This is a complicated story of epic sweep featuring a large cast.
As is the case whenever large amounts of money and power are at stake, there was a lot of backstage jockeying going on--companies trying to poach executives from each other, secret coalitions, factories burned to gain competitive advantage or for insurance monies, coded messages decrypted, and so forth.
Additionally there were fissures within families where the pursuit of money caused people to behave in a manner in opposition to longstanding traditions of honor and integrity.
Some of the characters speak German, others Polish.
I was often confused as to where a scene was taking place.
In order to satisfy the Soviet censors to get this made perhaps Wajda exaggerated by making all of the upper class characters truly disagreeable and arrogant, but given his later involvement with Solidarity in Poland, his sympathies were clearly with the workers.
I wish additional time had been given to examining the personal lives of some of the workers; as presented they appeared mostly as grim oppressed cyphers.Of the seven of Wajda's films I have seen I found this one to be the most accomplished cinematically, almost to the point where the filming trumps the story.
The creation of a Lodz at the turn of the century is a worthy achievement, on a par with the illusion of authenticity that you get when reading a Dickens novel.I am puzzled as to why this film has drawn such a small audience over the years..
A rich epic of the sweeping changes in values and material life brought on by the industrial revolution's rather late arrival in Poland.
Usually I tend to hold on to those movies where there are many things I can relate to, in other words modern realistic dramas.In this case, even if many situations in the film is dramatized incredible, its still a world that in some way did historical exist when Europe was early industrialized.
A storyline of a very raw world these people lived in, with a very hard over dramatized personal directions of the actors: This is a typical East-European style of a movie, when it comes to directing and acting.
Even if I was a bit put off by this over dramatization I was glued to the screen.This production is so well done in all aspects that you will be tussed around in your mind and almost put to trans like you did when you saw animated movies as a child.I disparead for many moments, and just fell into the movie, living in the story, something I seldom do nowadays.The entire concept of this movie is stunning.
The technical quality is about the best I have ever seen and heard of a movie that is that old.The scenaries are completely mind blowing, considering that digital effects didn't exist 1975.
I watched this film on DVD screened by very good equipment, and It was shocking that that quality could be produced 1975.Respect for Polish film workers !.
This epic film directed by the famous Polish director Andrzej Wajda is not nearly so widely known outside Poland as many of his other films, which have a broader appeal and are less disturbing and savagely ironical.
The film is based upon a novel by the classic Polish novelist Ladislaw Reymont (who died 1925).
Reymont is better known in English for his novel THE PEASANTS (CHLOPI), published in four volumes successively entitled Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.
This story is harrowing in the extreme, and to a certain extent becomes a caricature of 'the evils of capitalists', primarily speculators.
Of course, we all know today how dangerous speculators are, and every major bank seems to contains dozens of uncontrolled and uncontrollable 'rogue speculators', or 'casino gamblers' as they are often called nowadays, who keep bringing about disastrous losses and crashes which effect the entire globe.
But this film is a historical drama limited to what took place in the Polish city of Lodz during the 1880s.
One presumes that it must have a basis in truth of some kind, but being ignorant of the history of Lodz, I must confess I do not know.
The film contains a few 'in jokes'.
For instance, there is a scene where an uneducated Jewish moneylender is told that Victor Hugo has just died (which happened in 1885).
He says, after looking blank at first, 'oh yes, he wrote that book OF FIRE AND SWORD some portions of which my daughter read out to me.' Polish viewers would laugh their heads off at this, as the book referred to is one of the most famous works of Henryk Sienkiewicz and has nothing to do with Victor Hugo.
Wajda's rage when making this film was evidently so intense that he could not resist planting such small ironies as those within the dialogue.
The film portrays the most vicious, corrupt, callous and inhuman greed and arrogance imaginable.
Mill owners are shown saying: 'Let them die' when their workers are injured by the machines in their factories, and refuse to pay their widows a penny in compensation.
They go round the factories choosing the young worker girls they want for sex and forcing them into it with the threat of firing them and their whole families so that they will starve if the girls do not agree.
Jews are portrayed very harshly as stock characters who are greedy, vengeful and lascivious.
With the exception of one very nice and honourable aristocratic girl named Anka, who tries unsuccessfully to 'have concern for human suffering' by aiding a worker whose ribs have been crushed but is ordered not to do so, just about every character in the story is revolting, rotten to the core, and despicable.
The title is clearly an extremely ironical one, as 'the promised land' dreamed of by one minor character as a Lodz where everybody gets rich and is happy, is in fact the most brutal nightmare and hell on earth.
Wajda used his brilliant film making skills to create a highly watchable and rather mesmerising film, but it turns one's stomach.
Reymont's THE PEASANTS has been filmed as a feature film three times, in 1922, 1935, and 1973, and as a television mini-series in 1972.
Even in the midst of the dialogue of this film, the name of the national poet Adam Mickiewicz bursts through in conversation.
Especially at that time, it would have been hard to find a Pole who could go an entire day without referring to Mickiewicz, who was not only the national poet but a passionate supporter of Polish independence and freedom, who spent much of his life living on the Rue de Seine (see his plaque) in Paris as a political exile.
To a large extent this can be seen to be due to the struggle which the Poles have had over the centuries in maintaining a national identity at all, what with the Swedish, German, and Russian invasions, not to mention their tiffs with the Lithuanians.
In this film, there are many sarcastic references to and portrayals of Germans resident in Lodz at the time, and they come off worse than even the Jews, as the worst villains and scoundrels.
This film pulls no punches, but lets rip in every direction like a mad dog that wants to bite everyone all at once..
Ziemia obiecana (1975) was shown in the U.S. with the translated title The Promised Land.
Andrzej Wajda.In 1898, Poland was being transformed from a rural nation into an industrialized nation.
The city of Lodz was becoming the hub of the textile manufacturing industry.Three young men--a Polish aristocrat, a Jew, and a German--join in the rush to make their fortunes by building a factory.
They connive, they scheme, and they show total disregard for their workers or anyone else.The plot of the movie follows them as they follow their dream.The film is well acted and, of course, well directed.
However, it's a grim film that probably portrays the situation very well.
The problem is that the situation was ugly, and it's hard to enjoy a movie about amoral people acting dishonorably.We saw this movie at Rochester's wonderful Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman Museum.
The Promised Land was shown as part of the excellent Rochester Polish Film Festival..
Everything capitalist is evil in this cartoon-like view of history..
I am amazed that this film would have ever been nominated for an Oscar.
That's because the film seems very, very one-dimensional in its characterizations and seems much more like a propaganda piece than a historical film.
Now I am not saying there weren't some greedy and uncaring industrialists during the Industrial Revolution.
However, in this epic from Andrzej Wajda, ALL capitalists are evil scum...ALL.
And, oddly, all their women look like characters from a Fellini film.
Oh, and did I mention that all the Jews I saw in the film were evil money-grubbers?!
While the Oscar folks apparently liked it, I consider it a rather hateful film produced by a Soviet-backed government to promote their Marxist view of society.
An odd curio, but clearly NOT a film that is very good history or even well written from a non-historical standpoint.
Having read the previous reviews of this film, I am inclined to agree with the lone 3-star one.
What disturbed me most was the crude stereotyping of Jews.
One reviewer here has argued that all of the characters appear as crude, unsympathetic stereotypes - as if that were a defence of the film - and that it is therefore acceptable to stereotype Jews.
Even if the general tendency to crude theory-driven characterisation did not invalidate the whole thing, which in my opinion it does, there would still remain a difference in the way the crude stereotypes are constructed.The capitalists and peasants are stereotyped according to their social class: offensive enough, just as much to the grovelling, screeching workers and peasants as to the yapping, striding, quail-crunching capitalists and aristocrats.
On the other hand, the Jewish characters are clearly stereotyped along racial lines.
What could be a more crude, vicious and insulting repetition of the clichéd old stereotype of the two-faced, money-obsessed Jew?
The scene could have been used to create a contrast between traditional Jews and those who become involved in capitalism but, no, it's all of them.The central Jewish character is as subtle as a black-and-white minstrel.
The effeminate facial expressions; the inability to appreciate social situations except for their business opportunities; the way he looks on impotently as the properly manly Germans and Poles get their ends away at an orgy; there is little to the character but a collection of classic stereotypes.
Bravura Film-making of the Highest Order!.
Made after THE DAMNED, but before 1900, this operatic-style melodrama, about the industrial revolution in Lodz ca.
Like the other two films, it takes an extreme situation in history and makes it more extreme, piling on the excess.
Two examples here: a garden party that's like a Roman orgy, with naked women, tigers in cages, etc., and a scene where a worker grapples with his boss and they fall into a giant machine which instantly spews out their bodies as huge chunks of raw meat.
The characters and their single-minded mission hold the film tightly together, and the visual excesses seem like an inevitable part of the narrative, not sideshow set-pieces.
The film is incredibly visceral: the thrill of making a killing on the financial market, the inhuman noise of the factories, the excitement of undercurrents of rumors among patrons at the opera.
Most of all there's the brilliant use of relentless, machine-like music throughout that keeps up the unremitting unflagging pace.
The film has a power which stays with you long after you've left the theatre!
The subject certainly seems safe for an East European-bloc filmmaker--if ever capitalists were villains, it must have been at that time and place.
But in fact Wajda was making a politically dangerous statement.
The final scene of workers being shot at the order of the owners was an explicit comment on workers being shot in communist Poland a few years before the film was made.
This is a great film by one of the greatest filmmakers of the twentieth century!