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As a young boy growing up in Budapest, a town that would come to be known as “Hollywood on the Danube,” Béla Bunyik dreamed of being in the pictures. “I fell in love with movies in Hungary back in the ’50s,” Bunyik tells Variety. “When I was 12 years old, I started to work as an extra in a few movies…. In 1953, I spent a whole summer with a bunch of kids and some of the best Hungarian actors at the time.”

He recalls being picked up after school by talent scouts and cutting his teeth on the sets of films like Viktor Gertler’s 1954 adventure-comedy “Me and My Grandfather.” “Seeing how a movie was done was very exciting for me and I was sad when the summer ended, and the film was shut,” he says. But those formative years sparked a lifelong obsession. “I got hooked.”

Bunyik would later emigrate to the U.

The name talent attached makes this late- Weimar thriller a must-see proposition: Billy Wilder, Robert & Curt Siodmak, Franz Waxman. Their dark murder farce resembles what would later become the self-aware Black Comedy. The trouble begins when a suicidal nice guy can’t pull the trigger, and hires a crook to do the job for him. The satire is clever but the execution is awkward — the filmmakers set up big laughs that the heavy German filming style doesn’t deliver. Just the same, the situations seem extremely progressive, ahead of their time.

The Man in Search of his Murderer

Blu-ray

Kino Lorber Kino Classics Kino Repertory

1931 / B&w / 1:33 flat / 97 min. / Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht; Jim, der Mann mit der Narbe, Looking for his Murderer / Street Date April 6, 2021 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Heinz Rühmann, Lien Deyers, Raimund Janitschek, Hans Leibelt, Hermann Speelmans, Friedrich Hollaender, Gerhard Bienert, Roland Varno.