A vén bakancsos és fia, a huszár

In talking of the early Hungarian cinema, it would perhaps be more appropriate to talk of "Transylvanian" cinema because the pioneer producer/director/writer Jenö Janovics was born in Ruthenia (in a town now part of Ukraine) and established his base in Kolozsvár (now the town of Cluj in Romania). It was here that he founded Corvin film in 1912 which worked in association with Pathé's Austro-Hungarian subsidiary Imperium Film and became Transylvania film in 1916.

Parenthetically the important role played by Pathé before the Great War, in more or less direct succession to the Lumières, in continuing to spread the culture of cinema (an often cinema at its most artistic) throughout Europe and beyond (notably also Japan) is still not sufficiently appreciated.

It was with Janovics that everyone began - those who would leave Hungary and go on to be world-famous, like Michael Curtiz and Alexander Korda and those, like Márton Garas or the Fekety brothers who made this film (Mihály was the director,László the director), who remained behind and were doomed to be forgotten. Janovics was never far away. As well as producing, he adapted the nineteenth-century play (The Old Foot-Soldier and His Son the Hussar in English) and his wife Lili Poór also acts in the film (as Ilona).

Hungarian is a language I struggle with and it does not seem to be in the Hungarian character to supply any clear and concise account of any story. As far as I can make out the plot is as follows. Ilona is in love with Laczi, the hussar, son of the poor ex-soldier Mihály (known as "old boots"), a veteran of the Napoleonic wars but her father, the greedy tavern-owner Veres, who wants to marry her to an elderly widower, the Kantor (choirmaster/schoolmaster in Hungarian tradition) whose daughter Lidi he wants to marry off to his own idiot son Friczi (Ilona's brother).

The play was written shortly after the Revolutions of 1848 ("Revolution and War" for the Hungarians since it grew into a war for independence from Austria)and reflects the disillusionment that followed the defeat of the Hungarian army in 1849 (the war in which the Hussar leaves to fight and returns minus an arm) and the subsequent collapse of the liberal regime established in Hungary in the wake of the Revolution. So there is considerable satirical force in the portrayal of the villagers' indifference alike to the Napoleonic veteran (shown in flashback) and to the freedom-fighting son.

In 1917, when the film appeared, we are only two years away from the Revolution of 1919 (see reviews of Curtiz' agit-prop film Jön az öcsém). The author of the play, József Szigeti, was almost certainly, Jewish (the surname was one typically adopted by Hungarian Jews) and the Hungarian Ashkenazim were extremely active both in the nationalist struggle and later, as in Russia and the Ukraine, in the Communist movement; they were also extremely prominent in the cinema (all the later exiles - Curtiz, Korda, Pressburger, Sekely - were Ashkenazi).

Although it is a typical Balkan village where everyone has their role - the tavern-keeper, the Kantor, the doctor, the smith, one never really sees anybody doing any work. They spend their entire time gossiping, spying on each other and quarrelling.

A difficult film for anyone not Hungarian to try and fathom but worth, I think, the effort of discovery.