Knights of the Teutonic Order (1960): most super of the Polish “super productions”

For a company that’s over twenty years old, Second Run are finding a gratifying number of new strings to their bow. The largely untapped seams of world cinema they’ve been exploring recently include Indian independent films like The Circus Tent, Manthan and Ishanou, all of which reveal a very different face of that country’s cinema to the current Bollywood mainstream. They’ve also recently dipped a toe in the world of Polish superprodukcja, lavish historical epics from the country’s Communist era. The first such film Second Run released was Pharaoh, an epic exploration of ancient Egyptian power politics from the director of Mother Joan of the Angels, Jerzy Kawalerowicz. Now they’ve released arguably the most super of the superprodukcja, Aleksandr Ford’s Knights of the Teutonic Order.

Knights of the Teutonic Order shares a source author with Pharaoh – Henry Sienkiewicz, who also wrote Quo Vadis?. But it’s about a very different time and place, one which allows us to see how the superprodukcja directors tackled their own country’s history. Sienkiewicz’s novel was published in serial form in the late 1880s, at a time when Poland did not officially exist. For over a century at that point, the country had been partitioned between the Prussian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire. Krzyzacy, to give the novel its Polish title, became a major rallying cry for the nascent Polish nationalist movement, which some critics in 1960 noted made it a strange choice of subject matter for a Communist-backed film production. But then, Knights of the Teutonic Order is a fairly strange film.

Pharaoh‘s setting and subject matter makes it a cinch to compare it to Hollywood historical epics like Cleopatra and The Ten Commandments, but Knights of the Teutonic Order builds up to the 1410 Battle of Grunwald, an event not widely known outside the countries it directly affected. As such, for Anglophone viewers there’s something almost hallucinatory about seeing the style and lavish resources of a Cecil B DeMille epic allotted to a film which pivots so heavily on the foreign policy of medieval Lithuania. But I don’t think this is a problem. Even after watching Knights of the Teutonic Order, I am not confident that I could pass an exam about the history of fifteenth-century Poland, but that’s not why you watch a film like this. The reasons to watch a film like Knights of the Teutonic Order involve rousing action, memorable characters and spectacular visuals, all of which it excels at.

Mieczysław Jahoda’s Eastmancolor cinematography successfully resurrects the vivid pastel tones of Michael Curtiz’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, while the closing Battle of Grunwald and its thousand extras is as riveting as you’d hope. As far as its evocation of the Middle Ages goes, it’s the kind of film where you’re never more than twenty minutes away from someone slamming down a wooden tankard full of mead and letting out a hearty laugh. Again, though, this isn’t a problem; the stock scenes and tropes are both fun and form a useful anchor as the film gets very deep into the politics that led to its closing battle. Part of Ford’s reason for adapting Sienkiewicz’s novel was the rising tension between West Germany and the countries under the Warsaw Pact (which Poland was part of); upon seeing West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer attend a state event in a Teutonic Order mantle, he decided to remind people that Poland had defeated that order before. As such, he shot the black insignia of the Teutonic Knights to resemble a swastika, and the scenes of crisis diplomacy have as much sweaty countdown-to-disaster tension as the actual battles.

There is, therefore, a sense of purpose driving Knights of the Teutonic Order, one that’s palpable even today, at a time when the Cold War and the Warsaw Pact are as much a part of ancient history as the Battle of Grunwald. It is not without notes of anti-war pessimism underneath the stirring triumphalism: people are sent into battle wearing purely ceremonial armour, and there are visually discreet but still shudder-inducing scenes of torture. The sheer complexity of the story means there’s never a moment without masses of stuff happening, and for all that can be overwhelming it’s certainly never boring; despite my usual scepticism about these big historical war epics, I found it disarmingly easy to watch the whole 172-minute film in one sitting. You find your way through the maze thanks to a bevy of memorable, well-played characters, the pick of which is Urszula Modrzyńska’s hard-nosed, decisive nature girl Jagienka. As soon as she turned up, even a historical ignoramus like me realised at least one character was going to survive the final battle.

The 2K remaster by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation would be enough to recommend this Blu-Ray, the first UK Blu-Ray release Ford’s film has ever had, but there’s also some very useful extras. Michael Brooke provides a video history of the superprodukcja cycle, similar to the one he supplied for the “Czech crazy comedies” on Second Run’s release of Who Wants to Kill Jessie?. There are also archive newsreels relating to the film’s production and staggering box-office success across the Warsaw Pact countries, and a revealing booklet by Professor Anna Misiak. This begins with a potted history of the events leading up to the Battle of Grunwald, but quickly shifts to a more detailed history of Ford’s career, which is as up and down as the history of 20th century Poland. Ford began his directorial career as part of a collective in Nazi-occupied Poland: the collective was formed less out of comradely solidarity and more out of necessity, as they only had one camera between them. The rest of his career saw him both attaining near-autocratic levels of control over the Polish film industry thanks to his Communist Party bona fides, and also being denounced by the Communist Party for ideological impurity. It’s a rollercoaster of a life, and you finish it wondering if only a director who’s lived like that could make a film like this.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – KNIGHTS OF THE TEUTONIC ORDER