User reviews

One of the few movies where the "remake" was better. The movie "Stones For The Ramparts" 2014 (also released as Warsaw 1944) is based on the same subject. The real life story of a Polish group of underground resistance fighters called the Gray Army. The major beats are the same in both films but the second version is more involving. The cinematography in this earlier version is murky. The DVD transfer on the version I saw was horrible. Still, this version is watchable if you can't find the other one.

Polish war cinema is really great and this 1978 film shows a heroic page of Polish Defence against Nazy troops in Warsaw in 1943. The main heroes are young students who are inside the partisan militia group called Szare Szeregi, or Gray Ranks. They undertook several sabotage actions as well as military offensives killing some Nazi officers and providing actions of active opposition. The film is a classical Polish Soviet times effort with excellent casting, good tempo and very realistic battle scenes. What it lacks is a certain input of cash to make this albeit decent flick even more powerful and pushy. Certain passive approach makes the movie a bit slow by the mid-time and only the last part saves it from drag. Recommended still