Vabank – Juliusz Machulski | #film

Vabank – Juliusz Machulski

Why was a cheerful film about charming burglars in pre-war Warsaw allowed in Polish cinemas during the gloomy and heavily censored 1980s? Film critic Vladimir Gromov tells the story behind the making of Vabank – a Polish cult classic.

Juliusz Machulski’s Vabank remains one of those titles that still comes up in every conversation about Polish film. Not only known and loved in Poland, it quickly gained popularity and cult status in the Soviet Union as well. Humour, brilliantly constructed intrigue, exacting and tight directorial methods – in this film, everything came together perfectly, allowing the creation of a story both relevant and captivating to audiences from any country.

For Soviet audiences, the adventures of the bank robber Kwinto were an opportunity to see the bygone bourgeois world of 1930s Poland, which seemed so appealing and unusual. They were drawn in by the capitalistic atmosphere that was more associated with America or France, and almost unthinkable in Poland under the communist regime. This unparalleled world narrowly produced a greater impression on Soviet viewers than the story of the heist itself.

Of course, you could ask the question of how could such a movie come into being in the midst of the general communist stagnation? But there is nothing remarkable here: Vabank reflected the ability of Poles to feel free in any situation, to break the rules and conventions they were under, to seek justice and never lose their composure. Such is Juliusz Machulski himself, and such are his characters.

The star’s upstart kid

The story of Vabank is long and complicated. It’s hard to believe that the film made it to theatres at all, since there were so many circumstances that could have prevented its creation. It all began in the 1970s, when Juliusz Machulski was studying at Łódż Film School. The only thing that distinguished him from the other students was that his father was a famous actor. Everyone knew Jan Machulski. He was the embodiment of the positive, winsome hero in Polish film. He became especially beloved after his role in Janusz Majewski’s satirical film Sublokator: the elder Machulski played the scientist Ludwik, who is drawn into the schemes of his eccentric female housemates. For Juliusz, then a young student-director, his father’s renown was more of a hindrance than help. He was seen as an upstart child star who had immediately decided to get into the filmmaking business after school, demanding experience and talent.

Nevertheless, Juliusz was not disheartened. He had conceived his first films while he was still a student. Among these was Vabank. The younger Machulski wanted to make a film about a man accused of a crime he did not commit. The scene where the burglars disable the bank’s alarm using a piece of metal to interrupt the circuit was one of the first the director dreamt up.

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Still from the film Vabank directed by Juliusz Machulski, 1981, photo: Polfilm / East News

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From the very beginning, it was obvious to Machulski that his movie would take place during the twenty years between the world wars in Poland, in that legendary yet brief period of existence of an independent, bourgeois Poland. The reality of Poland under the communist regime didn’t suit the story of bank robberies, gun fights, enormous sums of money, and high-profile investigations. The director explained:

Interwar Poland was real, there was real money, real private banks, anyone could buy a weapon and a car, and the police investigators looked much more impressive than the police officials.

Who was the Goatee?

Besides this, people like Kwinto, the main character of Vabank, actually existed in this era. Machulski borrowed many of his hero’s traits from Stanisław Cichocki aka ‘the Goatee’ – the most notorious safe-cracker of the Second Polish Republic. Cichocki began his ‘career’ in imperial Russia, where he honed his ‘craft’ among Odessan thieves. He participated in group robberies in Germany, and later in Lithuania and Czechoslovakia. In Poland, he organised raids on jewellery stores and burgled several banks in Warsaw and Częstochowa. Cichocki acted boldly and inventively. The police arrested him many times, but every time, the court did not have enough evidence to put the infamous Goatee in prison for long. Machulski read a lot about the Goatee and thoroughly studied the history of the Polish criminal underbelly of the 1920s and 1930s.

The director wrote the first draft of Vabank’s script in the summer of 1977, during a vacation to the Bulgarian coast. He was 22 years old at the time, and he didn’t expect that anyone would allow him to make a large-scale film with its historical texture and adventurous plot. The younger Machulski hoped that he would be able to interest a famous director in his text. A famous director like Janusz Majewski – the same man who gave Juliusz’s father his biggest role up to that point. Majewski made extremely varied films: comedies like Sublokator, horror movies (Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach), fantasy movies (Awatar Czyli Zamiana Dusz / Avatar, or Exchange of Souls) and detective movies (Zbrodniarz, Który Ukradl Zbrodnie / The Criminal Who Stole a Crime). Besides, Majewski taught Machulski at Łódż Film School. However, the script of the future film did not make much of an impression on him. At the time, Majewski was getting ready to shoot the historical television series Królowa Bona and certainly did not want to work on some story about bank robberies. Also, it turned out that at that same time the directors Mieczysław Jahoda and Janusz Rzeszewski were also working on a film about the same Cichocki (the picture came out in 1978 under the title Hallo Szpicbródka, Czyli Ostatni Występ Króla Kasiarzy / Hello, Fred the Beard). This was a harsh blow for Machulski.

He decided to undertake the production of the script himself. No one wanted to work with him: besides the fact he was young and still looked like a teenager, he hadn’t a single film to his name. True, he did try to rectify this, filming the television movie Bezpośrednie Połączenie (Direct Connection), but this only made the situation worse, as the film turned out to be unsuccessful.

It’s possible the filming of Vabank would’ve never happened if help hadn’t unexpectedly arrived. The script accidentally came to the film association Kadr, which was then the most significant movie studio in Poland. Kadr was led by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, who had already made Night Train, Mother Joan of the Angels and Pharaoh. Machulski himself admitted that he was afraid not just to approach such a person, but even to crawl on his knees to him. Yet Kawalerowicz decided that Vabank was worth filming, and he entrusted Machulski as its director – though he stipulated that he was only doing this because he liked the script. The young director feared that the star director would push him to make a serious movie and not a comedy. But his fears were unfounded: Kawalerowicz was phenomenally well-versed in films of any genre and understood what was appropriate and what wasn’t. His leadership and patronage were a huge help – filming began.

Recreating a destroyed city

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Still from the film Vabank directed by Juliusz Machulski, 1981, photo: Polfilm / East News

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Several daunting tasks lay before the creators of Vabank. It would be difficult to recreate pre-war Warsaw, a city that no longer existed. Warsaw, which was almost completely destroyed during the German occupation, was preserved only in old photographs; only a few buildings had miraculously survived the war.

It was decided that the movie had to be filmed in Łódż and its surroundings, where they managed to find a suitable atmosphere. For example, Kramer’s bank was ‘played’ by an old house in the small town of Piotrków Trybunalski, and the Łódż Grand Hotel was the hotel where Kwinto lived. Practically all of the old-fashioned automobiles, of which there were many in this film, were provided by private owners and enthusiasts of old cars. This was a huge help, considering the studio didn’t have its own lot of retro cars.

Casting the lead roles was even more of a challenge. Machulski really wanted to give the role of Kwinto to his father Jan. For Duńczyk, he envisioned Andrzej Łapicki, one of the icons of the Polish acting school. Łapicki and the elder Machulski had made a fantastic theatrical pair in the play Miesiąc na Wsi (A Month in the Country), directed by Adam Hanuszkiewicz. Kawalerowicz, however, did not see Jan Machulski in the role of Kwinto at all. The elder Machulski had an established image as a gentle, good, and intelligent man, far removed from grim safe-crackers like the legendary Goatee. During the preparations for the movie, Bronisław Pawlik and Roman Wilhelmi, both famous enough actors at the time, emerged as candidates.

Juliusz Machulski did not give in: he forced his father to do a screen test, forbidding him from covering his bald spot, which he was embarrassed by. From the screen stared out a gloomy man with an aloof face. After seeing the screen test, Kawalerowicz had to agree. As an experienced cinematographer, he immediately knew they had their Kwinto.

But Łapicki didn’t agree to play Duńczyk. That was when the name of Witold Pyrkosz, who many people knew from his role in Krzysztof Zanussi’s film The Constant Factor, came up in the studio. Leonard Pietraszak, who would play Kramer, was already famous as the valiant Colonel Dowgird from the television series Czarne Chmury (Black Clouds). Jacek Chmielnik, who played Moks, a young thief and Kwinto’s accomplice, was found by chance. The younger Machulski spotted him in a restaurant in Łódż. He recalled that this young man, dressed in 1930s-style clothing, was a student in the acting faculty. The director walked up to him and asked if he wanted to play a big role in his film. But Machulski set this condition: Chmielnik had to answer right away, without reading the script. Chmielnik agreed to what would become his most famous role.

Machulski very much wanted for the police officer who lives with Kwinto’s wife to be played by Jerzy Stuhr. They were barely acquainted at the time and were still on formal terms, therefore when the director went to offer the actor the role, he didn’t even bother listening to him. Machulski simply wasn’t very convincing: he couldn’t even clearly explain what kind of movie he was making. In later years, Jerzy Stuhr would go on to play some of his most famous roles in Machulski’s films, and would ironically recall this situation, scolding the director for not being able to tell him about his concept in a coherent matter.

There were many disputes during the filming as well. For example, Machulski wanted to begin Vabank with a scene showing the murder of Tadeusz, Kwinto’s friend, who is thrown out of a window by a hitman sent by Kramer. Kawalerowicz was against it. He said that Vabank was a comedy, even though it may be about thieves. And a comedy should never begin with a dark scene, as the beginning sets the tone for the whole film. As a result, the film opens with a scene that became a classic, in which Nuta and Moks rob a jewellery store. There was originally yet another heist in the script. Machulski wrote a scene where Kramer and Kwinto rob a bank and the police catch them in the act, but he later abandoned this idea. The reason was simple: Machulski didn’t know the kind of man Kwinto had been before his six years in prison.

The image of Kwinto was the biggest discovery for the Machulski father and son. It took a huge effort to conceive this reserved, laconic, yet madly charming protagonist. Juliusz forbade his father from smiling, drastically reduced his character’s lines in the script, urged him to speak in a low voice, even though earlier Jan Machulski had specifically spoke with a higher intonation when on stage and screen. In the entire movie, Kwinto only smiles once – after he opens the safe in Kramer’s bank. This smile is memorable to all viewers. Jan Machulski imagined that his character had a nervous tic which would appear during tense moments, and he also convincingly portrayed playing the trumpet, even though he had never played the instrument before in life.

Getting past the censors

Filming wrapped at the end of 1981. There couldn’t have been a less suitable time for such a film to come out… after a year and a half of labour strikes, walk-outs and protests, Poland was placed under martial law. Thousands of people were arrested, and troops were mobilised around the whole country. All public meetings were forbidden. Travel and even phone calls were strictly monitored. Military equipment was set up in cities. Security officers and the demonic ZOMO special forces crawled all over the place.

The authorities closely watched the films that were coming out in theatres, dreading any sedition or criticism. It’s possible that if Vabank had been made twenty years earlier, the director would be accused of promoting bourgeois values and omitting any social criticism of the past. But at that moment it was more important to the regime that the movie didn’t invoke any negative emotions: for them this was just another piece about past times. The movie, which doesn’t encourage anyone to throw Molotov cocktails at authority figures or join labour protests, seemed relatively harmless.

But the authorities, who hadn’t noticed the ideological sabotage in Vabank, missed the point of the film. It was not simply a nostalgic movie about 1930s Poland and the charming thieves of that time. Kwinto, who delicately punishes the vile Kramer, showed that great evil can be overcome and put in its place. This was a story of a man’s victory over the system, which, it seemed, had anticipated everything. Kwinto and his accomplices brilliantly broke through the strongest and most reliable defences. Like the hero of the Polish folk legend, Pan Twardowski, they managed to outwit the devil himself. That was why audiences loved them so much. Kwinto, Duńczyk, Mokc and Nuta were for them their own kindred, charismatic heroes who could face any villain.

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Still from the film Vabank directed by Juliusz Machulski, 1981, photo: Polfilm / East News

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And how they all did it! Playing the trumpet, smoking cigarettes and driving around luxurious old-fashioned cars. They lived in a Poland, which, despite all of its illusiveness, was real. A Poland where there were banks, restaurants, jewellery stores, crowned eagles on the coats of arms, expensive suits and boisterous variety shows with rousing music. Poland at the beginning of the 1980s, weary from threats of Soviet invasion, massive repression and ideological hysteria, suddenly saw itself in a different light. At that moment, there was no movie more suitable for Poles than Vabank. Upon meeting Juliusz Machulski, the mother of actress Beata Tyszkiewicz said to him that, while walking out of the movie theatre onto the empty and dismal streets where military equipment stood, she felt like she had grown wings. Leaving the theatres accompanied by Henryk Kużniak’s upbeat ragtime, which had become the calling card of the film, audiences felt a rush of optimism and vitality.

Of course, no one could believe that Vabank was made by some 26-year-old first-time director with thick glasses. Reporters even asked him at press conferences: ‘Who was the real director?’ Many figured that the main credit belonged to Jan Machulski, since he wasn’t just an actor, but was also the head of Ochota Theatre in Warsaw, where he put on plays. But the portrayer of the lead role denied this, saying that the film was entirely his son’s work. Juliusz himself somewhat jokingly declared that the director was, in fact, Leonard Pietraszak, who played Kramer. Many people actually believed this. Doubts about the younger Machulski’s authorship were dispelled only after the release of his next film, Sexmission, which gained even more popularity than its predecessor.

The story continued…

In 1984, Juliusz Machulski made a sequel – Vabank 2. The sequel, as is normally the case, was inferior to the original in charm, but had a good pace and seemed more comedic. Audiences received it with pleasure. Julius Machulski had become the top comedic director in the country.

In Vabank 2, the director decided to spare his characters from the impending World War II. Kwinto and Duńczyk settled in Switzerland at the end of the film, the country which all the storms passed by. Near the end of the 1980s, Machulski wanted to make Vabank 3. The plot of this chapter would have to take place sometime during the war. Moks’ girlfriend Natasza, who served as ‘bait’ for Kramer in the first movie, and became an actress in the second, comes to Kwinto in Switzerland as a messenger from the Home Army. She asks if Kwinto and Duńczyk can open a Gestapo safe in which they keep the names of double agents embedded in the ranks of the Home Army. The script was ready, but the communist regime in Poland was collapsing and there was no money to make the movie. Today, Vabank 3 exists only in the form of a comic book. Machulski even mused about Vabank 4, which would take place in 1953 in Moscow. He said Kwinto and Duńczyk manage to steal something very important to the Soviet leadership there. The sheer scale of the heist and the audacity of the thieves shock Stalin so much that he has a fatal stroke.

Juliusz Machulski made many more movies, among which were brilliant comedies filled with wit and charm. However, over the intervening years, when returning to Vabank, you remember then it was this film, directed by a youngster, an unproven newcomer, that became the pinnacle of his career. Everything worked in Vabank: the perfectly cast hero, the tight directing, the humour that smacked the audience over the head, the bright atmosphere created with minimal means. And, of course, the incredible story about outsmarting evil. For all this and more, we love Vabank – the film that became an absolute masterpiece of Polish cinema.

Originally written in Russian, 3 Mar 2017, translated by KA, 7 Apr 2018