My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 10): An Extraordinary Critique of Capitalism

The Promised Land (1975)
Directed by Andrzej Wajda
Starring Daniel Olbrychski

Every once in a while, you stumble across and unknown masterwork. This is most often the case in movies and books, since newness is a primary virtue in each, (unlike, say, classical music), and works are often forgotten after their premieres. This week I watched The Promised Land, a searing 1975 critique of capitalism and income inequality by the fine Polish director Andrej Wajda, who I mentioned last week as the director of Siberian Lady Macbeth. I have never seen a film that so ruthlessly depicts the generations of people abused by the industrial revolution, and how the attitudes of the ruling/monied classes differ so strongly from those of the workers. This film won prizes at the Moscow Film Festival (then under Soviet control) and was a nominee for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars, a rare double that indicates how well the film transcended political rivalries to depict the human condition. One recent survey voted it the greatest Polish film (outpointing Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy among others). I was very impressed.

The film tells the story of three young men—an aristocratic Pole, a German, and a Jew. These were the three main communities that made up the city of Lodz around 1900. These men idealistically pool their resources to open their own textile factory, then the main local industry. Poland at the time was under Russian rule, but had a large Jewish and German community, so was an ethnic mix, all caught up in the Industrial Revolution. Abject poverty and famine drove farmers to come to work in the Lodz factories making textiles. The opening 10 minutes are stunning—grim automaton-people desperately seeking entrance to the factories, where decapitations, amputations, and death were common. As the manager says to a desperate worker: “Here you are optional. It is what the machines want that matters”. This is very similar to the opening and message of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis which I also reviewed recently. The big difference is that Lang’s film is a mixture of expressionistic art, fantasy, and science fiction, while The Promised Land is all gritty reality. Smokestacks dominate the horizon, spewing toxic vapors. Chemicals spill on the floor, burning the skin. Widows, amputees, and disfigured people crowd the city, all victims of industrial accidents. Bloodstained fabrics rotate through a machine, which the manager only stops reluctantly to see the nearby worker whose arm has been cut off….he orders the surrounding workings back to their own machines. In contrast, the scenes of the upper class occur in a famed Lodz palace built in 1890 by a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer. Most of the film takes place with relentless machinery noise in the background, and the limited musical score is musique mechanique, all pounding, relentless rhythm. The effect is quite overwhelming and intense.

Besides the amazing set design and sound, the film stands out for its candid and honest portrayals of the lead characters. Their only goal is to make money (much like the guys I sometimes hear talking on the train returning home from Wall Street to their fancy suburban Connecticut estates). All other metrics are secondary. These young men seek to join the moneyed class, just because that is the only metric of success they can imagine. Their backgrounds (faded aristocratic Polish family, working class Jew, rags-to-riches German émigré) are irrelevant—money is the only unifying factor. Factories can be started with little upfront money (reminders of the early 2000s in the USA), with money lent by Jewish investment houses. This last item would be hard to portray now, with all its anti-Semitic overtones, but was a historical reality in 1900 Poland. Since the Middle Ages, Jews had not been allowed to be tradesman, so instead entered banking and money lending as their only option. Of course, forty years later these wealthy Lodz Jews would be murdered in the Holocaust, a distant cloud that also seems to hang over the city along with the industrial fumes.

The film is striking in portraying every mercantile and upper crust character in the film with equal disdain, regardless of ethnicity. Wajda pulls off the feat of making us like the young men as people, but being repelled by their business behavior. This is also something we have to reconcile today, as we see people who seem friendly and congenial hold personal views or commit acts that seem vile and antisocial. This film forces you to see that juxtaposition directly.

The ending is wonderfully cynical. One of the young men has run off with the wife of a Jewish merchant. The merchant finds out and torches the new factory—a leitmotif in the film, as many owners torch their own factories for the insurance money, leading to a smoky background of almost every scene, as if the world is burning. In other films this destruction of the factory would end in a moralistic condemnation of the vicious owners. Not here. We cut from the burned-out factory to “Several years later”. The three young men are now older, much richer, and living in luxury. They are confronted with striking workers wearing red armbands (presumably around 1910), and casually order them shot. The film ends with champagne served to well-dressed dinner party guests, as gunfire from the police erupts outside—the guests now oblivious. All of this is done so artfully by the director that it never descends into political screed or propaganda.

The Promised Land is a forgotten gem (forgotten at least in the West), and incredibly resonant with the themes of inequality that dominate recent weeks and our era generally. The ironic title is fitting, and the film overall is an emotional roller coaster that makes you see how the twentieth century went wrong from its very beginning. I can see why alternatives like Communism and Fascism were so appealing to people living in this hell. An astonishing film.