A famous surgeon is beaten by drunken bullies, loses his memory and cannot recollect who he was before. He gets to a village, lives in a not so well to do family and becomes the Quack - he slowly regains his talent for medicine and saves the lives of several village patients.
Acting
Bińczycki's transformation from arrogance to weathered grace.
Cinematography
Hoffman's painterly Polish countryside—every frame a museum piece.
Costume
Peasant authenticity vs. aristocratic excess in 19th-century detail.
Director
Jerzy Hoffman
Jerzy Bińczycki
Rafał Wilczur / Antoni Kosiba
Anna Dymna
Maria Jolanta Wilczur / Beata Wilczur
Tomasz Stockinger
Count Leszek Czyński
Bernard Ładysz
Miller Prokop
Artur Barciś
Wasylko
Andrzej Kopiczyński
Doctor Pawlicki
Piotr Grabowski
Zenek
Bożena Dykiel
Sonia
Maria Homerska
Czyńska
Igor Śmiałowski
Czyński
Jerzy Trela
Obiedziński
Piotr Fronczewski
Dobraniecki
Gustaw Lutkiewicz
Irena Burawska
Irina Ozhekhovskaya-Peskova
Olga
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Based on Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz's beloved 1937 novel, this was Hoffman's passion project after the Communist era's collapse—finally made with Polish state funding without censorship.
Bińczycki reportedly spent weeks in actual 19th-century surgical museums to master the physicality of pre-modern medicine; the amputation scene used real period instruments.
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