Austeria

In an inn on the edge of a Galician town in the first days of the First World War, a group of Jews takes shelter from the Cossack troops advancing through the region. Among the fugitives are merchants and Hasidim, joined by a Polish priest and a Hungarian hussar. As explosions sound and the town burns, the guests debate whether to flee, while the innkeeper, the elderly Tag, refuses to abandon the place he has built his life around and instead tries to restore some order among the frightened people and to see to a dead young woman brought to the inn by the man who loved her. The film is set in the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the outbreak of the war.

Jerzy Kawalerowicz directed, working on the screenplay with Tadeusz Konwicki and Julian Stryjkowski. It is the third of the three features he made in the period covered here, following Pharaoh and Maddalena. Franciszek Pieczka plays Tag, with Wojciech Pszoniak, Jan Szurmiej, Ewa Domańska, Wojciech Standełło and Liliana Głąbczyńska among the cast of forty-six.

The film runs 102 minutes. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.7 from 727 votes, and on TMDB a rating of 6.5 from 26 votes, a modest difference of scale and score that suggests a small but settled audience.