Andrzej Wajda has only made a handful of films, not all of them good; yet already he is safely among the modern masters. The one director in the Polish cinema whose work one can study as a whole, he is, so far as one can see, its only romantic poet; his style—sombre, stark, elaborately symbolic, often laden with baroque decoration—exists to expose the dark passions of his heroes and their hopeless courage. (pp. 408-09)

The emphasis on courage, youth, physical strength and aspiration blazing like solitary beacons in the night of the world—this is at the centre of the lyrical-romantic Polish literary tradition. Mickiewicz, Stowacki—these poets with their powerfully evocative imagery, their hymns or elegies to the proud youth of Poland dead in war or revolution, are the spiritual godfathers of Wajda and of the late Andrzej Munk. And it is not too much to say that, like Mickiewicz, Wajda has been the voice of Poland crying in its agony, as well as a worthy singer of its eternal songs of freedom. (p. 409)

Disciplined and stark, A Generation has the fierce lyrical intensity of a Mickiewicz poem…. [It] stands in the mainstream of the Polish artistic tradition: it celebrates youth and beauty and courage, the struggle of the emergent warrior to conquer his fears, the final bursting into flower of manhood and strength. And in a sense, Wajda's personality is undergoing a similar purifying process in the development of the film; one can sense a determined attempt to spare himself nothing of his memories of 1942, of his thoughts of people and things seen, loved and lost. The austerity of the images [never falters]….

A Generation remains Wajda's purest, most stripped and disciplined film. And its few moments of emotion—notably when Dorota is arrested, and Stach breaks into a sudden agony of grief—are all the more disturbing because of the tight-lipped sternness of the rest. In Kanal (1957), Wajda's style is already becoming more rhetorical, more baroque; nevertheless this, too, remains a powerfully haunting and beautiful film, and its technical skill shows a rapidly maturing grasp of the medium. (p. 410)

With Ashes and Diamonds, the third part of the trilogy (1958), Wajda emerged in the full romantic colors. The austere style of A Generation gives way completely to a dynamic virtuoso flair seldom found outside the American cinema. The film is—simply on the technical level—Wajda's most breathtaking achievement, its visuals and sound-track orchestrated with triumphant skill…. (p. 411)

Occasionally the film tilts over into self parody—notably in the sequence when an inverted crucifix shifts and groans above the two lovers in a church (and much of the film suggests a talent strained beyond its resources) but Ashes and Diamonds still retains a seductive brilliance and power.

[In Innocent Sorcerers (1960)] the young Poles of the earlier films are discovered in a wholly contemporary world of motor-scooters, fast parties and willing girls, and the ravaged faces and bodies of the war years have filled out into the strength and beauty of a well-fed post-war generation. (p. 412)

At the end of the film, in the original version … planned by Wajda, comedy turns to tragedy: sophistication destroys love, and Magda walks away [from the doctor], their relationship unconsummated. But the producers, the Kadr Film Unit, forced a happy ending on them; after the doctor's desperate search for Magda through the streets, he finds her waiting for him in his room.

The last minute sell-out by no means destroys the impact of this fresh, graceful and quietly erotic film. It is full of wit and an edged, urbane charm, but the underlying dark poetry of Wajda is unmistakable. In the central characters, the whole nature of post-war youth is exposed: its sardonic common-sense, its self-destructive smartness and amorality, its permissive sensuality and moments of fierce disillusion. (pp. 412-13)

The character of Jakub Gold [in Samson]—fatalistically returning to certain death in the ghetto, only finding his Samson's powers by self-immolation for an heroic cause—is in direct line with Stach's in A Generation, and one sees Wajda's nostalgic need to return to a period when hopes and ideals were high…. But the film is severely flawed by the symbolism which is Wajda's curse; the Biblical parallels lie heavily on scene after scene, and too often the beautiful, bleak images—figures strikingly disposed in the Cinemascope frame—simply become melodramatic friezes, theatrical backdrops to a heavily overworked allegory. (p. 413)

[Contemporary] Poland remains a rather shadowy presence on the cultural map of the West and Wajda, poised between two worlds, dealing in the most powerful of international mediums, seems uniquely equipped to cast light on that darkness in the years to come. (p. 414)