I realize that some of the acting in "Bad Luck" may seem to be dated, but still, this movie is one of my all-time favorites. Outwardly, it shows three pictures from Polish history in a caricatural and grotesque way: the 1930s, the German occupation, and the 1950s. It ridicules the "god and country" spirit of the 1930s, some heroic myths from the times of Nazi occupation, and the grotesque, Kafka-like reality of the society living behind the iron curtain. So for casual viewing, the film deals only with Polish problems and does not have universal appeal, but if you look at it more closely, it asks much deeper questions. First of all, what the film says on the surface is, to a large extent, true-the same way as Monty Python's films are still valid. Secondly, "Bad Luck" is also an illustration of some universal truths. Specifically, we are always following some patterns of behavior that don't necessarily agree with our personality. So we sell our own personality to win over a woman, achieve popularity with other people, gain money and position, or simply follow the current fashions even in case we regard them as silly or wrong. This is somewhat similar to the themes touched on by the Polish writer Witold Gomrowicz in his novel "Ferdydurke", but in the form of a funny comedy. Thirdly, I think that "Bad Luck" also touches on the problem of indoctrination, and its overall conclusions are timeless. I watched this movie for the first time in the late 1970s, when I was 18 years old, and at that time I was having similar thoughts about some of Polish traditions. Even though I was raised in a Catholic family in communist Poland, by the time I was 18, I already had the same views on communism as George Orwell and looked at Catholic doctrines from the point of view of "The Life of Brian". My favorite writers then were Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Jean Paul Sartre, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Miller, and Saul Bellow. In comparison to those names, some Polish writers that we (together with my colleagues) had to study at school looked to us boring, shallow-minded, and their characters one-dimensional and flat. I mean mostly writers like Mickiewicz, Sienkiewicz, and Zeromski. Without contesting the literary talents of those people, we had completely different interests and didn't want to waste our time on studying them. I was also beginning to understand that my ancestors in Poland were farmers or craftsmen, and in "independent Poland" were treated much like Blacks in America before Martin Luther King. So a lot of my colleagues were rebelling against the upbringing where too much stress was put on patriotism and nationalism. Thanks to movies like "Bad Luck", Monty Python, or films with young Malcolm McDowell, we knew that we were not just a bunch of unruly teenagers. But skepticism and negation are just first steps. In my case, I became an engineer, moved to the West for some years, and worked for many years in international teams with people from various nationalities and races in a constructive way. This experience makes me think that schools should focus on science, and when it comes to humanities, the emphasis should be only on the heritage common to all mankind.
