I saw the movie at a university film series in the early 80s. I was just learning to broaden my tastes, and saw a weird foreign film.

It was about the last days of some heroic communist revolutionaries. Black and white, subtitled. I remember one scene in a bar where one man bitterly names each of their dead comrades and lights a glass of liquor for each name. The movie ended by going into full surrealism, with a white horse walking through a formal state dance in a ballroom. Ambassadors and countesses just waltzed around the horse. Our hero gets gunned down by police in the street.

I once asked a film instructor about it, and he said that the horse in the ballroom was a moderately famous scene, but he couldn't remember the name of the movie.

I'm almost positive that it's Andrzej Wajda's "Ashes and Diamonds".

Sounds like something from the Czech New Wave of the '60s, but the horse scene isn't ringing a bell. Maybe the phenomenal Ucho (The Ear) by Karel Kachyna. It had something like a ballroom scene, but I don't remember a horse. Anyway, the film wasn't actually released until the late '80s, after being suppressed by the government at the time of its production.

Edit: me12321 is right, but I don't remember those scenes.

Pretty sure it's Eisenstein's Akademy Polizei 3.

I think that's it. The essay on the Criterion site refers to both the lighting glasses of vodka and the white horse.

http://www.criterion.com/asp/release...&section=essay

It makes me want to see the movie again, and maybe understand it this time.

You rock!

I saw a few "cool" commi movies but have no any recollection of that scene.

will criterion be releasing this?