Examiner par boblipton

Gregori Chmara gives best-selling author Artur Socha enough morphine to kill him. Then he goes back and steals Socha's latest manuscript. He tells girlfriend Agnes Kuck that it's for them. Now they can be famous and rich! Well, not immediately, because he can't get it published until he forges some signatures on a letter of credit and pays the costs. But it happens, and the book is a wild success, and a theater company wants to produce it as a play. He begins an affair with the leading lady. Miss Kuck threatens him with exposure.

Henryk Szaro's movie shows a lot of Dutch angles and quick cutting at the beginning to establish the movie's credentials as an up-to-date silent movie, then defaults to a slower pace and more standard set of visuals. This is not an error. I found the sense of oppression that this slow pace produced a sense of oppression, even as Chmara lives it up.

I also found it surprisingly sophisticated. I've seen some very early Poish movies, before 1910, and several produced for the Yiddish-language market in the 1930s, and thought them visually well done, but stolid. Of course there would be a tremendous leap backwards in camera work when sound equipment tied down the production, but this one moves lithely when called for.