Ms. Double-0 Sevenska

Ian Fleming, the creator of 007 James Bond, had a war time lover. She was Winston Churchill's favorite spy. She was Polish.

Now, a big budget Hollywood movie is being made to tell the story of Krystyna Skarbek who used the name Christine Granville during World War II.

Dubbed `Churchill's favorite spy', she was awarded the George Medal for her work against the Gestapo. Her courageous actions, including a treacherous crossing into her native Poland from Hungary helped saved countless lives. After the war, she drifted into a series of affairs – including one with Fleming – before enrolling as a stewardess on a cruise ship where she met the man who was to murder her in 1952.

The film is now in pre-production and will be directed by AgnieszkaHolland, whose credits include Total Eclipse, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

Skarbek's cloak-and-dagger exploits saw daring raids into occupied Poland, with forays into Egypt and Syria. Parachuted into occupied France in 1944, she took on the persona `Pauline Armand' to rally the Resistance.

Christine Granville, was IanFleming's inspiration for the James Bond character Vesper Lynd.



Vespar Lynd played by Eva Green

Katyn Premiere

Polish director Andrej Wajda will premiere his new film Katyn Sept. 17 at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia.

It's a personal story for Wajda because his father was killed in Katyn.

Katyn (Post-Mortem) examines the Katyn massacre of 1940, in which Soviet troops killed thousands of Polish POWs – members of intelligentsia drafted into the Polish army. It shows the massacre and it shows the lie that came after: The Soviets maintained that the massacre was committed by the Germans in 1941 when actually it was the Soviets in 1940.

You Kill Me Trailer

YOU KILL ME
Trailer just released




Comedy about a Buffalo Polish Mob Hitman with a problem

[Click Here] See original post & synopsis

Film about Polish Mob Hitman

The Film "You Kill Me" will be released in a theater near you just in time for the time honored Polish tradition of Sobotka I think it is a coincidence - Hollywood marketing departments aren't all that smart. [About Sobotka]

Pre-screening by Variety says the film keeps the viewer agreeably off-kilter, John Dahl's latest walk on the wild side gets serious comedic mileage from playing noirish (Czarni) absurdities deadpan-straight. This film should appeal to those who like their humor (and love stories) quietly outrageous.

Ben Kingsley plays Frank Falenczyk, a hitman for his extended Polish family in Buffalo, N.Y., where they control the all-important snowplow franchise. He is also a full-time alcoholic, which increasingly wreaks havoc on his work. After botching a job Uncle Roman sends him to San Francisco to sober up -- or else. He attends AA meetings, gets a gay sponsor and lands a job in a mortuary, where he meets a woman who is a relative of one his hits.

Internet movie trailer not available yet.

Latter Day Goebbels

Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels the Nazi propaganda guru once said, "Tell a lie often enough and people will start to believe it." German film director Volker Schloendorff must have graduated from the Goebbels school of cinema.

Heroes of the 1980 strikes which gave birth to Poland's legendary anti-communist Solidarity trade union on Monday slammed a film by the Oscar-winning German director Volker Schloendorff dramatising the rise of the Soviet bloc's only trade union.

Due to premiere Monday in Gdansk, the Baltic Sea port and cradle of the historic Solidarity union, the film - Strike - the Hero from Gdansk (Strajk -Die Heldin von Danzig), was slammed as "offensive" by several of the real-life heroes who founded the trade union. Schloendorff loosely based the script on key Solidarity activist Anna Walentynowicz, a crane operator whose firing in August 1980 sparked the famous strike at the Gdansk shipyard which gave birth to Solidarity.

"This film does not present the true facts of Anna Walentynowicz' s life," Solidarity activist Joanna Gwiazda said Monday in Gdansk, quoted by the Polish PAP news agency. Gwiazda said Schloendorff misrepresented Walentynowicz as being illiterate and skewed facts about her personal life. Joanna's husband and fellow activist Andrzej Gwiazda also accused Schloendorff of misrepresenting Poles and falling victim to national stereotypes. "The film shows poorly-educated and hard-drinking shipyard workers - it fits perfectly with the (false) vision of Poles as drunks and thieves," he said.

A spokesperson for Walentynowicz said the pensioner was threatening a lawsuit should Schloendorff refuse to cut several scenes she finds slanderous. Schloendorff was awarded a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1980 for The Tin Drum, also made in Gdansk.

Polish Films to See

My favorite Poilish Language Movies available at the Toledo-Lucas County Library are


Bez konca (No End)

The "hero" of NO END is Antek, a young liberal lawyer who dies four days before the film begins. He leaves behind his beautiful young widow Ulla, their son, and the unresolved trial of a Solidarity organizer.

Reluctantly caught up in the trial, Ulla finds herself unable to get Antek out of her mind, literally haunted by his memory. Antek shows up from time to time in ghostly narrated soliloquy.

She pledges to help the wife of the jailed labor organizer searching for the written trial strategy prepared by her late husband and begs Antek's old law school professor and now aged public defender to take the case. The old lawyer kinda reminds me of Abe Vagoda - "Barney Miller" and "Godfather" fame. This is a serious and somewhat dark drama. Not as dark as czarnina, but close.

Denny's Gwiazda rating (1-5) = *** 1/2


Popiol i diament (Ashes and Diamonds)

Portrait of a young Polish nationalist assassin who, when World War II ends, finds himself living uncertainly, moving from echoing bars to seedy hotel rooms, finding comfort in a girl and crazy jokes.




Zbigniew Cybulski -
the Polish James Dean - stars.

Award winning role.





Denny's Gwiazda rating (1-5) = **** 1/4


For a little instant drama check out the video short with Doda Elektroda.



Denny's Gwiazda rating (1-5) = sto jeden


A Completely Different Version - Same theme



Denny's Gwiazda rating (1-5) = not rated