The Saragossa Manuscript

There are eight million stories in the naked city, and almost as many folded into this elegant, gorgeous and slyly funny adaptation of the early 19th-century novel by Jan Potocki. The framing story involves a Belgian soldier, Capt. Alphonse van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski, often called the James Dean of Poland), who takes refuge from battle in an abandoned barn and finds a marvelous book. It recounts the escapades of an adventurer named Gomelez (Cybulski again) as he tries to navigate some haunted hills en route to Madrid. Gomelez repeatedly ignores warnings not to stay in any deserted inns and therefore encounters all manner of supernatural spirits, notably a pair o...