"It took six years for Jerzy Domaradzki's 1981 The Great Race to reach the screen. Certainly it's not the cynicism of Feliks Falk's brilliantly corrosive screenplay that explains the delay. What probably damned The Great Race is less the disillusionment it fosters than the illusions it shatters. For in this 50s-set saga of a grueling, three-day, patriotic Foot Race for Peace, where few of its participants are really up to such exertion (qualification is based on work quotas, fine moral fiber-anything and everything but athletic skill), there can be no winner. This truism has not yet become apparent to the film's two heroes-an opportunistic prole who's in it for what he can get (money) and his idealistic newfound friend, who's in it for what he can't (justice for his wrongly accused father). But try as they may, the two can never imagine, much less approach, the unvarnished chutzpah of the State as it pulls off an 'Emperor's New Clothes' number bold enough to end all social fiction." -Chicago Film Festival