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Wielka, większa i największa

Entry updated 18 January 2025. Tagged: Film.

["Great, Greater, and Greatest"] Polish film (1963; vt The Great Big World and Little Children). Directed by Anna Sokolowska. Written by Sokolowska and Jerzy Broszkiewicz , based on Broszkiewicz's Wielka, większa i największa (1960). Cast includes Bogusz Bilewski, Zofia Kucówna, Urszula Modrzynska, Bronislaw Pawlik, Wojciech Puzynski, Kinga Sienko, Mieczyslaw Stoor and Andrzej Szczepkowski. 137 minutes. Black and white.

For much of its length, this film is best described as a Fantasy, as two precocious children – a boy (Puzynski) and girl (Sienko) – are aided in their adventures by mysteriously animate Machines. They stumble upon an old car that talks to them and drives them to desired destinations. The children first rescue a kidnapped child, then the car takes them to a similar talking airplane, which they board. They soon locate the survivors of a plane crash, transmit coordinates to guide a rescue party, and personally retrieve two crewmen who left the crash site to trek across the desert in search of assistance. The film then enters sf territory as another talking car takes them to a shoreline, where they encounter a strange floating sphere; after they enter, it transports them to the star system of Vega. There, they meet Aliens who are disturbed by humanity's violent tendencies (evidenced by footage of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima) and hence hesitate to admit Earth to their community of nations. But the children manage to persuade the Vegans to change their low opinion of humans. Back of Earth, the children embark upon another journey in their talking car.

This film is faithful to its source material (since author Broszkiewicz also cowrote the screenplay) and is generally entertaining if not particularly exciting. The novel and film were possibly influenced by Robert A Heinlein's Have Space Suit – Will Travel (August-October 1958 F&SF;1958), another story about aliens based in the Vega star system who are convinced by two young humans to give the human race another chance to demonstrate its emerging maturity. [GW]

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