George Sax - 05/02/2008 
It would be a Polish joke of another sort entirely if the story Roman Wionczek's movie tells is factual. While some British and Americans have quietly been contesting the right to claim credit for breaking the German Enigma code during the Second World War (there's even a fanciful Matthew McConaughey movie); the Poles seem to have been harboring some resentment. This 1979 feature argues that it was three Polish mathematicians, working in the Polish Cipher Bureau, who first cracked the code, and then gave it to the British and Free French. The former may have built an improved code-reading machine at Blechley Park under Alan Turing's direction, but it was Poles who made this possible. Since it was a Polish diplomat, Jan Karski, who tried to warn the uninterested Churchill and Roosevelt about the unfolding Holocaust, this might be true, although the film could be more gripping. It plods some, in a neo-Socialist Realism way, and it has the least impressive Hitler impersonation I've ever seen. |
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