Innocent Sorcerers is a charming, absorbing essay in the newer Polish sophistication. Sophistication has in any case its gradations of refinement in self-consciousness, and in Andrzej Wajda's film it is a little heavily played….

Innocent Sorcerers has a conventionally happy ending that could have been far better left ambiguous. The sophistication of this night of verbal seduction is nicely, if, as I have said, a little obviously played; but in a way it becomes all the more poignant because of the essential amateurishness of these bourgeois pretensions in the rough surroundings of the war-scarred buildings. Our bourgeois eyes, sated by years of the Italian, French, German, Austrian and American variants of the old sentimental story of how what starts out as seduction can turn into the charms of true love, will find, I think, a certain pathos in this assertion by Polish youth that they, too, have the...