In interviews, Wajda often identified as a musical layman, alleging he “prefers silence.” Yet The Conductor, an exemplar of Poland’s "cinema of moral concern,” dramatizes the world of classical music with ease. Working for the first (and last) time in America, the director activated English stage titan John Gielgud as John/Jan Lasocki, a prewar emigrant who enjoys conductorial fame in New York. Wajda regulars Andrzej Seweryn and Krystyna Janda act as maestro and violinist in a provincial philharmonic undone by the arrival of mythic Lasocki after decades abroad. Released just after Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal, the film marks a high point of Wajda’s ’70 allegoricism, the intra-ensemble authority struggle widely interpreted as a microcosm of Polish politics at the time. (“The orchestra is a society that accepts one leader but not another,” Wajda observed.) The Conductor was a favorite of Ingmar Bergman, who would have also appreciated the stylization of Gielgud as something of a stand-in for then newly-elected Pope John Paul II.