Cast

Kazimierz Opaliński, Zygmunt Maciejewski, Zygmunt Zintel, Zygmunt Listkiewicz, Roman Kłosowski, Kazimierz Fabisiak, Ludosław Kozłowski, Janusz Bylczyński, Stanisław Marzec-Marecki, Józef Para, Stanisław Jaworski, Celina Klimczak, Natalia Szymańska, Nowak, Janusz Paluszkiewicz, Leon Niemczyk

awards

Karlovy Vary IFF 1957 – Best Director; Warsaw Mermaid – Polish Film Critics’ Award for Best Polish Film of 1957

Film description

Man on the Track was Munk’s first collaboration with Jerzy Stefan Stawiński. Stawiński’s screenplay, his first, was originally slated to become one among the many crime films popular at the time. Meanwhile, the screenwriter later recalled, it turned out that instead of a crime story I wrote a political story (Debiuty polskiego kina, Marek Hendrykowski (ed.), Poznań 1997, p. 127–128).

A machinist named Orzechowski (a moving portrayal by Kazimierz Opaliński) is killed by a train. A commission is set up to investigate the accident. The first witness, the stationmaster Tuszka, suggests that Orzechowski, an alleged saboteur, was responsible for the accident. However, subsequent witness testimonies serve to create a melancholy, layered story of a man who valued his work ethos and common decency above party dictates.

Innovatively, Munk used propaganda movie tropes to decry Stalin’s regime by showing how the dogmatic pursuit of hollow ideals can destroy an individual. Munk’s unusual narrative device was to have successive narrators tell the story from different points of view. The movie’s soundtrack was highly original as well, relying only on ambient sounds without music to create its moods.