Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958) User Reviews

An early showcase of Polanski's very personal talents

[debblyst · 8/10 · 8 March 2006]

Roman Polanski's short films made between 1957 and 1963 in Poland, plus the French-made "Le Gros et le Maigre" (1961), are available in the 2-disc set Criterion release of "Knife in the Water" (his landmark first feature, 1962). It's a great opportunity to discover his early work and confirm how uniquely talented he was from the very beginning. My two personal favorites: the masterpiece "Le Gros et le Maigre" (q.v.), a Beckettian satire on despotism and humiliation; and this fascinating "Two Men and a Wardrobe", which tells the surrealistic story (without dialog -- Polanski seldom used dialog in his shorts) of two men who come out from the sea carrying a huge, heavy wardrobe (symbolic interpretations are welcome, of course) and land on a seaside village only to be rejected and humiliated by everyone they meet.

Mixing tones of Absurd Theater (Beckett, Ionesco), silent comedies (Keaton especially), surrealism (Magritte comes to mind), and Kafka with a very sophisticated visual style (those fabulous framings!), his very peculiar sense of (black) humor, great rhythm and K.Komeda's perfect score, Polanski manages in 15 minutes to build an exhilarating, original tale about intolerance, hypocrisy, selfishness, cowardice, violence, and prejudice -- but also about bonding friendship, about acknowledging your background and standing up for who you are (check out the ending). This is the kind of work that proves that short films can be a completely satisfying film format.

P.S.: The role Polanski plays here is a sort of "prequel" to his Chinatown thug.

Runs The Gamut From Absurd To Routine

[ccthemovieman-1 · 6/10 · 19 June 2008]

"Wardrobe" has two meanings for most people: 1 - A wardrobe (sometimes called an "armoire") is a standing closet, sometimes called an "armoire" used for storing clothes. Sometimes it is in the form of a big trunk. 2 - a collection of wearing apparel; a collection of stage costumes and accessories I know it as the second definition but in this movie, an early Roman Polanski film, it is a big "dresser, a large piece of furniture to store clothes and has a mirror in the middle of it. It looks big and tough for even two people to carry.

So....imagine the absurdity of the opening scene: two men appearing out of the ocean, walking to shore carrying this "wardrobe!" That scenes sets up this strange 14-minute film, the first one of Polanski's to get public viewing. Polanski made films in Poland for the first five years of his career. I wonder what people there thought of this strange tale.

This movie starts out strictly as a comedy, almost like an old silent film one because there is no dialog so all the humor is physical. However, it then delves into some other odd areas, such as animal abuse, some unexplained and non-eventful and very routine scenes with a girl, some fistfights. You just never know what will happen, all the while the two guys are carrying this huge wardrobe around. I left out mentioning a bunch of strange things so as not to spoil it.

Like most of Polanski's early works, this is unusual stuff. My opinion is that many people would see this in many ways, and have a wide wide of likes and dislikes about it. One thing for sure: it's different. You can see this early Polanski effort on disc number 2 of the "Knife In The Water" DVD.

Early Brilliance From Polanski

[brainofj72 · 8/10 · 3 September 2006]

"Dwaj ludzie z szafa", more commonly known as "Two Men and a Wardrobe", is an early short film from Roman Polanski's film school days.

The most well-known and arguably the best of Polanski's short films, "Wardrobe" is a fairly simple story – two men emerge from the ocean carrying a wardrobe, and they travel through a city trying to find a good home for it.

The film is black and white, fourteen minutes long, and completely free of dialogue. It is truly remarkable what Polanski can accomplish with so little. It is deceptively simple on the surface, yet beneath beats the heart of a profound, touching fable. Who are these men? Where are they from? Are they human? They traverse humanity, representing innocence, and witness nothing but skepticism, intolerance, and violence. These are themes that Polanski would revisit later in another short film, "When Angels Fall", and, in a way, he would revisit them many years later with The Pianist and Oliver Twist. It's hard to call the two men protagonists, or even characters at all. They are more the lens of the audience – a mere vehicle through which Polanski displays mankind. Mankind is what this film is about. We are the characters.

The film is heartwarming and playful, yet ultimately cynical and sad. Is there no place for innocence and peace left in the world? Are we just a vicious, hating, violent species? In the end, that is all the two men and the wardrobe find, and they retreat back into their ocean haven, disappointed, disillusioned, and slightly broken.

This short film can be found on the Criterion DVD release of Polanski's debut feature film Knife In The Water, and it is well worth seeking out. It is visually dazzling, alludes to many themes Polanski would explore further in the future, and it more than holds its own as a stand-alone film. A must-see for any Polanski fan.

The promise of Polanski

[jonni · 5 May 2000]

One of his earliest films, at 25 years old, Polanski is still exploring the best way to shock the audience, engross the audience, AND serve them a feast of the unconventional. Perceptive, witty and occasionally downright nasty (see the theatrical 'murder' in the river as the two heroes blithely carry the wardrobe along the bank), Polanski's trademark weirdness is still embryonic but ultimately satisfies. An oddity, yes, and a must see for anyone who cherishes dreams of film school.

Two Men and A Wardrobe

[Steffi_P · 6/10 · 30 August 2007]

This Polanski short, like quite a few of his student pieces, looks something like a silent comedy. I say "looks like" because there aren't really any gags here, but there is no dialogue and there is a jaunty, silly feel. The theme of Two Men and A Wardrobe is simple. The eponymous duo are for some unexplained reason compelled to carry a wardrobe everywhere they go, because of this become social outcasts – thrown out of a restaurant, beaten up by thugs and so on. The abused misfit would crop up throughout Polanski's career, but as far as everything else goes this early work is very un-Polanski. It is bright and breezy, with none of the darkness and confinement with which he is usually associated. It does however introduce his camera style, with long takes and lots of panning.

The silent approach was a sensible one for a cheap student piece – no dialogue to worry about, and a good chance to get to grips with physical acting and purely visual story telling. With the 1950s European setting it reminds me a little of Jacques Tati. As I said though there really is no comedy in Two Men and a Wardrobe, at least, nothing to make you laugh out loud – it's more a case of weird little ideas and attention grabbing shots – also very typical of a young filmmaker looking to make an impact. More substance would be needed for Polanski to move onto full-length features.

a kind of small, nifty absurd/surreal film-making

[Quinoa1984 · 10/10 · 2 October 2006]

I saw this Roman Polanksi short on the Criterion collection DVD set, and it's definitely one of my favorites of his. It shares a lot with silent comedy, but it's a little more peculiar within its own conventional quirkiness. It's all about two men, and a wardrobe, as the title all too blatantly makes clear. But what ends up being surprising, funny, and even touching to an extent is where the wardrobe gets taken around to. They can't seem to get it really anywhere, and the destination of the wardrobe seems to be undetermined. It's really all a big excuse to showcase a mixture of silent-film comedy with an underlying message that could be read into. What's it like to bring along something or someone that is just very out of place? This becomes all the more evident as the two men try to rest it down at some places, only to find they have to take it back up again and keep walking. I loved the bits of business that happened, but even just as much the light whimsy that's given to such a strange scene. What's more surreal than two men carrying a wardrobe along a beach? And the music by the great composer (who's best work is in Knife in the Water) Komeda, gives the picture just that perfect quality that lends itself to being memorable still. It's 14 minutes of cinematic bliss for Polanski fans, and for a student film it's got a genuine lot of creativity, humor, and a point that is not lost amid the tact of entertaining to no end.

The Visitors

[p_radulescu · 10/10 · 18 June 2011]

It's a small miracle, this movie, and its universe is so close to Nóż w Wodzie: two people come from nowhere with an absurd (?) wardrobe, nobody accepts them, they will eventually go back to nowhere. They are like visitors from another planet, it's the collision of two worlds: ours, ignoring them at best, hostile at worst, theirs, the pure imperium of the sea (or maybe from that border where sea meets heaven).

I remember the Roadside Picnic of Strugatzky brothers: what happens if some visitors come here? Nothing much, from our perspective, they are too small sized, or too weird, or too annoying. They carry a wardrobe, or they come to clean our homes without our knowledge (like in the movie of Kim Ki-Duk), oh, and they are smiling like freaks. And they go back, toward nowhere, because for us anything that's not our universe is nowhere.

Very weak start to a big career

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 29 September 2013]

The English title of this film is "Two Men and a Wardrobe" and that pretty much describes director Roman Polanski's very first directorial effort more than 50 years ago pretty adequately. It's shot exclusively in black and white and shows us in its roughly 15 minutes running time how two men rise from the sea to the land carrying a wardrobe for some reason. We witness the struggles that they face during their journey when meeting other people until they finally return to the sea again.

There's really nothing outstanding or particularly memorable about this short film. As a whole, it's pretty boring and the soundtrack can't save it.The one thing which was at least slightly interesting was Polanski, in his mid20s back then having a cameo that actually is pretty similar to the one he has in Chinatown 15 years later. In any case, if you want to brag about having seen Mr. Polanski's full body of work, this one's for you, otherwise there's many better short films from notable directors during their very early years out there. I'm fairly certain that, without the big name attached to it, this film would have sunken into oblivion a long time ago. If you still want to see it, don't be scared of the title. There is no audible dialog included, so not being able to speak or understand Polish won't come as an obstacle.

Really fun surrealist short from Polanski as a 25yr old kid!

[Ben_Cheshire · 9/10 · 2 April 2004]

Plot outline: two men carrying a wardrobe appear, walking out of the sea. The walk all over town, getting into trouble, being silly, and walking past the odd social atrocity every now and then.

I was surprised when i saw this to learn that Polanski has been around this long. Polanski always seemed to me to exist only in the 70's, when he made that string of cult classics, and downright just great movies, and also when the double tragedy happened to him, of his wife and friends being slayed by the Manson family, and his subsequent being charged for sleeping with a minor, and not surprisingly not being able to face this, after a life filled with tragedy after tragedy (he lived in a ghetto during his childhood, i believe), his finally fleeing the US.

So i was surprised to learn that he had an entire career in Poland before he came to America, the beginning of which was this short, just under eighteen minutes long, which provided an art gallery audience the other week with a rousing good time. He might be pleased to know that the audience were more impressed by his short than with Pabst's Pandora's Box, and to my mind, that's saying something.

Actually, Polanski's short, which came very early in his career, he was only 25, is one of the most fun surrealist shorts i've seen. It has a young person's sense of fun in its absurdity, but also the cynical world view of someone who's been through traumatic events. I'm never quite sure whether proper surrealist art should have a meaning or not, because Dali, a major proponent of such art, often made meaning in his paintings, and there is certainly meaning in the Dali/Bunuel filmic collaborations Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or. Actually, i would hesitate to call this movie more fun than L'Age D'Or, but its definitely lots of fun.

You can see what Roman Polanski looked like in 1958 in this short, since he has a similar cameo to that in chinatown, playing a kid who smashes the hell out of the face of one of the men with the wardrobe.

This has definitely made me want to check out more early Polanski stuff. I hear his first polish feature, Knife in the Water, is fantastic.

Prejudice

[moemoul · 25 June 2000]

Having studied the films of Roman Polanski thoroughly in the early 70's while taking a ground breaking GCSE O'Level in Film Study, I was lucky enough to take in the early works including Two Men and a Wardrobe. The film starts with the arrival of the two men from the sea as if joining a closed community from the outside world. Along with them they carry their burden, the wardrobe. The film documents their inability to be accepted into a society who's prejudices come to the fore as they are turned away from cafes and shops and eventually leave the society that shuns them. The wardrobe is symbolic of all societies shortcomings, whether it's sexism, homophobia, racism or plain class distinction. This is Polanski's first film and sets his stall out for a career which never hides from controversy, which includes the mock horror of Dance of the Vampires to Repulsion and the brilliant Cul de Sac. His crossing of genres take him past Shakespeare's Macbeth and Hardy's Tess, but most ardent fans return to the earlier work. Any one who enjoys Two men and a wardrobe should search out Knife In The Water before they return to his Hollywood days.

Interesting movie by a troubled soul

[peroyvindjohnsen · 10/10 · 29 May 2005]

I saw this movie many years ago and I've forgotten a lot of it, so this comment is likely to contain some inaccuracies, but here is goes: From the beginning to the end, it is a short and absurd story about - just like the title says - two men and a wardrobe.

Two unknown men arrive at a beach carrying with them a worn and soaked wardrobe. They travel to town but meet problems wherever they go. There's no accommodation for them, not at mention the wardrobe. Nobody wants them there and the wardrobe, which they carry with them wherever they go just causes to annoy and bother the people they meet. The wardrobe, not very mobile furniture in any way, gets more and more damaged as the story unfolds. It is eventually destroyed (or perhaps not - I can't remember) and the men return to the beach traveling back to wherever they came from.

After I saw it I didn't understand anything of it. Was it just a simple and absurd story without any message at all? Hardly. I'm not going to interpret it in any profound way, but If I said that Roman Polanski (the director of the movie) is a Jew with a lot of horrible memories from Europe during the second world war and that people always carries baggage with them, either metaphorically or literally, then this should give a little hint at the symbolical messages within the movie.

Really cool little student film...

[paladin-49 · 18 June 2000]

Although you can file this movie under experimental or avant-guarde (which are controversial film genres), I think that if only all film student made short films as good as this one... perhaps student films would have had a wider audience (other than film students!).

4 Polanski shorts

[Michael_Elliott · 29 February 2008]

Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958)

*** (out of 4)

As the title suggests, two men carry a large wardrobe around the city getting in all sorts of trouble. Polanski shows good timing in the comic moments and his cameo as the gang leader reminded me of a certain scene in Chinatown.

Break Up the Party (1957)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Somewhat amusing short from Polanski has a more interesting history than what's exactly on screen. Polanski threw a party at his school and invited a gang to break it up half way through. That's what we see here.

Teeth Smile (1957)

*** (out of 4)

Another short from Polanski, this one dealing with a peeping tom. Once again the young director shows he would become quite capable of building some nice atmosphere.

Murder (1957)

*** (out of 4)

Roman Polanski's first short film quickly shows a murder taking place. For such a short film (running time wise), the director does a very good job at showing atmosphere and the murder is quite effective as well.

Under the paving stones, the beach.

[bateauivre11 · 21 October 2003]

Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958, Poland-15min)Yes,it can be a film about intolerance.But it showed not the intolerance about homeless,gays,or different believers.i think it showed the intolerance about everything that was against the communist system. A Polanski friend who studied with him once told about `their'game' during studies.They used to get into the tram and polanski pretend to be very ill,like he was dying.This way he got the seat.Near their stop,when the tram was slowing down,Polanski suddenly recovered said BYE BYE! And jump off the tram.It seemed foolish,but that was actually the way he fought against the system.In this film Polanski played some kind of evil creation,the boss of a local mafia.It was his most typical `character creation',because he played similar roles in other films like A GENERATION(POKOLENIE) directed by his mentor Andrzej Wajda also in KONIEC NOCY(END OF THE NIGHT).Very interesting was Polanski'' short film "`ROZBIJEMY ZAWABE(WE'LL BREAK UP THE PARTY)to make this film he payed the real trouble-makers to bit the party of Lodz Film Academy students and he. just filmed that!,again polanski played the bad boy in the film'NIEWINNI CZARODZIEJE'.He appears there ony a few minutes but he manages to beat the main character of the film! After moving outside Poland ,Polanski abandoned this profile,but made one exception,as you probably remember in CHINATOWN he suddenly appears and knifes Jack Nicholson's nose.in this moment he plays an evil dwarf ,is both scary an funny.

His experience in Polish theatre gave him a lasting love of Absurdism, with its sardonic, existential view of life's futility, and its vicious parodies of the chaotic power games that underpin (and often undermine) social structures.

Polanski was not only interested in this kind of personages,he likes the relantionship between' the master and the servant' The domineering and the repressed ,as we can see in his short film' The Fat and the Lean' (1961, B&W, 15mins) or in features like Knife in the Water (1962); Cul-de-sac (1966);Dance of the Vampires(1967) etc.

Two guys, a wardrobe and a beach

[Snap Dad · 7 May 1999]

Despite the English title sounding a lot like a recent sitcom, it is a short, very early film by the master of early film making, Roman Polanski. I saw this on a documentary on Polanski late last year (1998), and i thought it was kinda funny, in a queer way. It is, of-course in Polish, so i don't know what happened exactly on the movie, but i can talk about the style on the feel of the movie.

It looks as if it was made when film was just starting to get it right, (even though it was 1958!). It probably cost a fortune for him to make, since he was still a nobody at this time. The movie starts with these two guys on a beach, and they are struggling to carry this enormous wardrobe. The scenery and the props as i just mentioned don't seem to go together, and the result is pretty funny. Watching these guys trip in the sand carrying a huge wardrobe is like watching someone push a shopping trolley down the isle of a movie theatre, you watch it and just sorta... laugh!

The two guys eventually meet some other people, and then dialogue became involved so i got lost again. So what i'm trying to say is that if you're a die-hard fan of Roman Polanski, you still probably won't like this short, black and white movie...

But i've seen something you haven't, I've seen something you haven't, i've seen something you haven't...

A little too long but an amusing and meaningful tale

[bob the moo · 28 January 2004]

Two men come up from the beach carrying a large wardrobe between them. They come up into the town but not only find that accommodation is difficult to come by with their wooden travelling companion but also that both women and men shun or mistreat them.

It was very strange to watch this early short from Roman Polanski, watching it as I was in the Rainbow pub in Birmingham as part of the 7' Cinema screening - it felt like it was a mix of modern and classic. Certainly the soundtrack alone had a mix of `old' music and scenes with pumping base, not sure if the version I saw had been remixed in some way. However, the film and the subject matter is still the same over the years.

The essence of the film came to me to be acceptance of the different. Here we have a couple of guys who clearly stand out as different from those they encounter. The reactions they get are ones of refusal, dismissal or ignorant violence; all pretty much as a reaction to the sight of the wardrobe. While this is a pretty basic message, and one that doesn't explain every scene, it does work well as an amusing comedy as well as the subject.

The cast are OK but have to overact a little bit as a result of not having any dialogue and having to express emotion and meaning a lot more through looks and reactions to others. The end of the short is a slightly depressing judgement on the basis of society, however that doesn't mean it doesn't have an element of truth to it. What it sadder is that the judgement is becoming truer with each passing year.