Man of Mettle.

• Author: Freund, C.P.
• Position: Polish film director Andrzej Wajda - Brief Article

What a long, strange trip this honorary Oscar took when Jane Fonda handed it to Polish director Andrzej Wajda at this year's Academy Awards. Fonda was the highest-profile "revolutionary" of her generation before embarking on a series of identity shape-shifts that have included Fitness Queen, Trophy Wife, and now Born Again Christian. Wajda spent his life revealing revolution's moral fraudulence. Only Hollywood, in honoring him, could then have committed the kitsch of pairing him with Fonda.

"If you understood what communism was," Fonda reportedly told a Black Panthers fundraiser back in 1969, "you would pray on your knees that we would someday become communists." Wajda knew. His films chronicle the duplicity of the...