Wajda used a literal cast of thousands for this stunning black-and-white CinemaScope epic concerning a Polish legion that fought on the Spanish front during the Napoleonic Wars to secure the freedom of their country. Brilliantly staged and executed, with an embrace of costumed spectacle and battle montage equal to the epic films of Anthony Mann and Sergei Eisenstein, Ashes's cinematic genius is considerably more resourceful, considering that Wajda filmed in a Poland lacking a sizable number of stuntmen; the film's many horsemen and infantry troops were volunteers or cavalry veterans. Wajda's antiheroic stance and refusal to shy away from the brutality of warfare (Ashes includes “some of the roughest battle scenes ever filmed,” noted Variety) led a fervently nationalist wing of the Communist Party to use the film to divide the country between “revisionists” and “true patriots,” with Wajda condemned as the former.