Wild West, Wild East: Western Conventions in Jerzy Hoffman’s and Edward Skórzewski’s “The Law and the Fist” and in Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski’s “The Wolves’ Echoes”

Łukasz A. Plesnar

Abstract

Plesnar is trying to prove that Edward Skórzewski and Jerzy Hoffman in The Law and the Fist (1964) and Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski in The Wolves’ Echoes (1968) used in varying degrees genre conventions of the western. It is apparent in the construction of the main protagonists, standing with arms in hand, alone, fighting bandits acting in the guise of law. Also narrative structures and storyline patterns of both films remind us of the western, as well as their placement in time (“after the war”, in real westerns - it is usually the Civil War, here it is World War II) and space structures (the deserted town in The Law and the Fist remind us of western ghost towns, pastures of Bieszczady look like undulating hills of Wyoming or Dakota). Even the iconography is similar: arms (although Colts were replaced by Soviet TT pistols), horses, the carts of repatriates (settlers), and to some degree, costumes (Gustaw Holoubek as Andrzej Kenig from The Law and the Fist is styled on Shane, and Richard Pietruski as Wijas - on the gunslinger Jack Wilson from George Stevens’ Shane /1953/). Plesnar concludes that while in the Wolves’ Echoes the adaptation of the western convention is rather mechanical, in The Law and The Fist it is much more creative, modifying and enriching it with the “local colour”.