Last week I attended the UK premiere of a new Polish film, Battle of Warsaw 1920. It gives a lurid and (inevitably) hugely simplified account of one of Europe’s greatest battles.

As I left the cinema I found myself wrestling with a grim and unwelcome question. Had it been the worst film I had ever seen?

The historical story is gripping and extraordinary, and almost totally unknown here in the UK.

Basically, after the Russian Revolution Lenin followed the instruction manual and believed that there could be no true Marxist revolution in backward, peasanty Russia – revolutions needed angry industrial proletariats, such as the one in defeated German. To mobilise and reinforce the German workers the newly formed Red Army had to get to Berlin, which meant trampling over the newly re-formed state of Poland. The Poles advanced into Ukraine to try to stop the advance further east, but failed.

So westwards the Red Army advanced, with a young Stalin as political commissar. However, as they closed in on Warsaw the Polish forces led by Jozef Pilsudski effected a daring if not desperate circling manoeuvre and managed to divide and defeat the Soviet attack. The result was a huge military disaster for the Kremlin and a momentous set-back to Soviet ambitions to spread revolution into wealthy Europe.

There is an ignominious British angle here, with the UK’s trades union movement doing everything possible to help the Russian communists and stop the British government sending military assistance to Poland. Thanks for that, comrades.

Thus the basic story is remarkable and full of both historical and human interest. Charles de Gaulle was involved as a young French officer helping the Polish army. Stalin fell out with the other revolutionary leaders over the causes of the defeat but survived the criticism. In 1937 Stalin took revenge on General Tukhachevsky who as a remarkably young officer had led the Soviet attack on Poland – Tukhachevsky (by then a Marshal of the Soviet Union) was tortured into confessing to be a German agent and summarily executed. Were the horrendous Katyn massacres of the Polish officer class in WW2 Stalin’s pay-back for the way the Polish side treated thousands of Soviet prisoners after the Warsaw battle?

Any film made today about such colossal events has to present at best only a few key features and leave out myriad others. Is the end product nonetheless presented with artistic style, intelligence and at least some subtlety? In this case the answer is a glum No.

It starts off quite nicely, with a young Trotsky leading the communists into action, and hints of intellectual liveliness and jolly decadence in newly independent Warsaw.

As it winds on almost everything is reduced to a banal Polish cliché. The battle scenes are of course tumultuous, and remind us just how horrible it was as these vast armies charged at each other and ended up fighting hand-to-hand. Yet even here the frequent glimpses of severed limbs and hideous wounds are somehow presented in a revoltingly prurient way. The 3D effects were lame and annoying. 

Otherwise we see nothing but an assembly-line of boring stock characters each there to ‘represent’ something obvious. The cruel, crafty hard-drinking Cheka commissar and primitive drunk Red soldiers defiling ruined bourgeois property. The uncertain priest who finds the courage to lead a Polish charge to slow-motion massacre. The smirking alcoholic Polish military officer trying to take advantage of the heroine back in Warsaw; he gets demoted and dies a perfunctory death. The heroine herself, a yummy naive cabaret dancer who gets drawn into the war as a nurse and ends up like Rambo, mowing down Reds with a machine gun.

There’s more. Much more.

A drunk but plucky Cossack. Two camp Warsaw intellectuals who quickly manage to crack the Soviet military codes. A few walk-on gormless peasants with hearts of gold. The hero who (absurdly) ends up with the Soviet forces as a potential propaganda victory and sees for himself the depravity of communist methods: quite how he seamlessly ends up back on the Polish side defending Warsaw after this ‘treason’ is not explained. We see repeated shots of bulging-eyed Red Army fanatics bawling ‘to Warsaw’, to remind us what the film is about. Slowmo crosses spin through the air amidst the carnage to tell us that the Soviets were evil atheists.

The Polish victory is known in Poland as the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’. Here the hero is comprehensively bayoneted in slow motion by a fleeing Red. But at the end the heroine finds him in hospital, alive. Another miracle!   

The film accordingly sinks to the level of poor propaganda. The artistic value is negligible. The internal Soviet leadership conflicts and other international angles are ignored. Many scenes will touch Polish hearts as part of the detailed Polish collective national memory of the battle, but leave everyone else on the planet unmoved or puzzled or even vexed.

Is it for foreigners to be too critical? After all, Poland’s post-WW2 Stalinists tried for decades to wipe this battle and the later Katyn Massacres from the Polish national consciousness. Part of the very point of films such as this is all about Poland ‘reclaiming’ its history back from Moscow. A more than laudable aim.

Yet not all laudable aims are done well. Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn won many strong reviews for its subtle handling of that horrendous event. I’ll be amazed if this banal new film by Jerzy Hoffman gets anything close to the same praise.