DVD/Blu Ray

Knights of the Teutonic Order (PG) Film Review

Director Ford is fond of long, close-up tracking shots over milieus like forest army camps, castle feasts and lowdown inns, and they are the best thing here.

Colin Dibben February 21, 2026 2 minutes read

Dir. Aleksander Ford, Poland, 1960, 172 mins, in Polish with subtitles

Cast: Mieczyslaw Kalenik, Urszula Modrzynska, Grazyna Staniszewska, Andrzej Szalawski, Henryk Borowski

Review by Colin Dibben

This stolid, epic tale has sold the most cinema seats in the history of Polish cinema. I blame school parties. The Eastmancolour lends a certain cheesy, medieval fairytale look to the goings-on but the film lacks power and nuance at almost every level.

Zbyszko (Kalenik) is a young, rural, medieval, Polish nobleman. He falls in love with Danusia (Staniszewska), whose father (Szalawski) has gone outlaw after the German knights of the Teutonic Order killed his wife. The knights claim to be doing the Pope’s work and lord it over the kings of the region. But their intrigue and powerplays and violence are about to lead them into a great battle for the heart and soul of Poland.

Director Ford is fond of long, close-up tracking shots over milieus like forest army camps, castle feasts and lowdown inns, and they are the best thing here. A very nicely edited montage sequence at the beginning of the film gives the discerning viewer expectations that the rest of the film fails to live up to. It is cheesy and stodgy throughout, without any of the audacious undercuttings of drama that marked another Polish blockbuster, Pharoah, a few years later.

All the actors look like they are just delivering lines, none of them come alive in any way – or otherwise suggests a meta-angle to the events on screen. I suspect this didn’t even work well at the time as propaganda – the history at times of both setting and production was just too complex.

Things look pretty good in this 2K restoration, but that only accentuates that the whole thing looks like a dull Technicolor Hollywood medieval drama – just made in Poland.

Knights of the Teutonic Order is out on Blu-ray on 23 February 2026.