A young architect is locked up in prison. He recalls his uncompromising youth and gradual sliding into the moral swamp of compromises. He was not alone. A group of his friends, dreamers and glass house builders, accompanied him.
El protagonista principal, apodado "Teddy Bear" -oso de peluche- es el entrenador de un club deportivo. Un día, cuando su equipo queda fuera de la competición, alguien roba varias páginas de su pasaporte. Todo al tiempo que su exmujer intenta saquear su cuenta bancaria en Londres. Para solucionar sus problemas, decide hacer una película...
Tadeusz Krzakoski (Krzysztof Kowalewski), the director of a failing state-owned company, is married with problems. His mistress, the daughter of a Communist party bigwig, says she's pregnant and Tadeusz knows he'll have to marry her to save his reputation and his job. But divorce is never simple and Bareja's screwball comedies are never boring.
The young couple love each other. The boy is in constant work which will fit him, and in the end becomes a petty thief who cannot pay his debts anymore and decides to steal from homes where he pays scheduled visits to lonely housewifes. The girl works a nurse but is too sensitive in extreme cases. Running parallel to their story is a metaphor involving a castaway on a junkyard, who tries every means possible to get rid of the dog which becomes attached to him. In the end he attaches sticks of dynamite to the dog, but he breaks loose and the explosion wipes them both.
Wlodek is a young man stuck in a dead-end job at the local library who lives with his harridan wife and critical in-laws in a small apartment. When Wlodek draws the interest of a library patron, the beautiful young woman encourages him to strive for better things in his life and professional career. Together, the two take off for a three-day affair, but surprises could await Wlodek upon his return home.
Sampson is one of several Andrzej Wajda films harking back to his youth during the Nazi Occupation of Poland. Many of these concern not only the struggle between good and evil, but also between passive and impassive. The hero is a Jewish youth. He, like his family, has always been silent and undemonstrative in the face of prejudice. Now he stands up for his right to survive, and in so doing represents the fighting spirit that culminated in the 1943 Warsaw Uprising. It was originally titled Samson, but re-spelled as Sampson upon its American release to avoid confusion with a sword-and-sandal epic of the same name.
