My honest thoughts on the 1932 Polish drama November Night

If you have got a soft spot for dusty, pre-war European historical dramas where everyone emotes with their entire body, November Night is worth an evening. It is perfect for people who collect weird black-and-white classics, but anyone who needs fast pacing will probably turn it off in ten minutes. 🎬

This 1932 Polish film takes a big, theatrical look at the 1830 uprising against Russia. It has that heavy, old-school vibe where every single sigh feels like a minor earthquake.

Jadwiga Smosarska plays the lead, and wow, she can stare down a camera. Her eyes do about eighty percent of the acting, which is great because the dialogue is sometimes hard to follow.

The sound quality on the surviving prints is pretty rough. There is this constant hiss in the background that sounds like someone is frying bacon in the kitchen next door.

A few things I wrote down while watching:

• The incredible, heavy wool coats that look like they weigh fifty pounds.
• One soldier who trips slightly on a rug during a very serious speech, but they just kept filming anyway.
• The way the shadows stretch across the walls in the palace scenes.

There is this one moment where a character is pacing around a candlelit room. The shadow on the wall is so massive it almost looks like a horror flick, giving me weird flashbacks to the creepy atmosphere in The Golem.

The romance plot gets a bit bogged down in the middle. It is definitely less interesting than the actual political backstabbing and the threat of war.

It does not quite reach the wild, cinematic heights of silent masterpieces like The Wind. Still, it has its own chilly, autumn mood that works if you let yourself get lost in it.

The ending comes up incredibly fast. One minute people are arguing in dark rooms, and the next, the screen goes black and you are left blinking at the wall.

It is definitely not a perfect movie, and the copy I found was pretty beat up. But there is a real, raw passion to it that modern CGI historical films just cannot copy.