Release calendarTop 250 moviesMost popular moviesBrowse movies by genreTop box officeShowtimes & ticketsMovie newsIndia movie spotlight
    What's on TV & streamingTop 250 TV showsMost popular TV showsBrowse TV shows by genreTV news
    What to watchLatest trailersIMDb OriginalsIMDb PicksIMDb SpotlightFamily entertainment guideIMDb Podcasts
    OscarsEmmysToronto Int'l Film FestivalHispanic Heritage MonthIMDb Stars to WatchSTARmeter AwardsAwards CentralFestival CentralAll events
    Born todayMost popular celebsCelebrity news
    Help centerContributor zonePolls
For industry professionals
  • Language
  • Fully supported
  • English (United States)
    Partially supported
  • Français (Canada)
  • Français (France)
  • Deutsch (Deutschland)
  • हिंदी (भारत)
  • Italiano (Italia)
  • Português (Brasil)
  • Español (España)
  • Español (México)
Watchlist
Sign in
  • Fully supported
  • English (United States)
    Partially supported
  • Français (Canada)
  • Français (France)
  • Deutsch (Deutschland)
  • हिंदी (भारत)
  • Italiano (Italia)
  • Português (Brasil)
  • Español (España)
  • Español (México)
Use app
  • Cast & crew
  • User reviews
  • Trivia
  • FAQ
IMDbPro

The Round-Up

Original title: Szegénylegények
  • 1966
  • 1h 30m
IMDb RATING
7.5/10
3.6K
YOUR RATING
The Round-Up (1966)
DramaHistoryWarWestern

In Hungary, the national movement led by Kossuth has been crushed and the Austrian hegemony re-established, but partisans carry on with violent actions. In order to root out the guerilla, th... Read allIn Hungary, the national movement led by Kossuth has been crushed and the Austrian hegemony re-established, but partisans carry on with violent actions. In order to root out the guerilla, the army rounds up suspects and jails them in an isolated fort. The authorities do not have ... Read allIn Hungary, the national movement led by Kossuth has been crushed and the Austrian hegemony re-established, but partisans carry on with violent actions. In order to root out the guerilla, the army rounds up suspects and jails them in an isolated fort. The authorities do not have the identity of the guerilla leaders, who are supposed to be present among the prisoners. ... Read all

  • Director
    • Miklós Jancsó
  • Writer
    • Gyula Hernádi
  • Stars
    • János Görbe
    • Zoltán Latinovits
    • Tibor Molnár
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    7.5/10
    3.6K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Miklós Jancsó
    • Writer
      • Gyula Hernádi
    • Stars
      • János Görbe
      • Zoltán Latinovits
      • Tibor Molnár
    • 15User reviews
    • 19Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 2 nominations total

    Photos31

    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    + 25
    View Poster

    Top cast32

    Edit
    János Görbe
    János Görbe
    • Gajdar János
    Zoltán Latinovits
    • Veszelka Imre
    Tibor Molnár
    • Kabai
    Gábor Agárdi
    • Torma
    • (as Agárdy Gábor)
    András Kozák
    András Kozák
    • Ifj. Kabai
    Béla Barsi
    • Foglár
    József Madaras
    József Madaras
    • Magyardolmányos
    János Koltai
    János Koltai
    • Varjú Béla
    István Avar
    • Vallató I
    Lajos Öze
    • Vallató II
    Rudolf Somogyvári
    Attila Nagy
    Zoltán Basilides
    György Bárdy
      Zsigmond Fülöp
      László Csurka
      László György
      • Csendör
      József Horváth
      • Director
        • Miklós Jancsó
      • Writer
        • Gyula Hernádi
      • All cast & crew
      • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

      User reviews15

      7.53.5K
      1
      2
      3
      4
      5
      6
      7
      8
      9
      10

      Featured reviews

      10xaggurat

      No way out

      Szegénylegények is one of the best films I've seen. Even though it is not very violent or graphic, I went through same emotional scale as I did watching Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo. Group of men, subdued and prisoned, are submitted to different traps by their jailers to find their leader. There's no way out, just another trap after another. A friend who I watched it with commented that it's like Kafka without any humor.

      Black & white film suits The Round Up perfectly. Contrast in photography, white buildings and dark figures give a very cold feeling, which contributes to movie's hopeless atmosphere.
      8lasttimeisaw

      an ardent cri de coeur that mercilessly yanks the fig leaf off human cruelty

      "In the third act, cunning skulduggery is played up to reveal the naïveté of the corralled preys, a false promise takes an about-face to take the winds out of those elated's sails, a cog in the wheel doesn't have a prayer to be reprieved, Jancsó's allegorical upbraiding (especially in the wake of Hungary's failed 1956 uprising against Soviet Russia) hits like a gut punch, miracle never occurs to the defeated, persistence can hardly be parlayed into other people's mercy, not least in the political imbroglio."

      read my full review on my blog: cinema omnivore.
      10lizard-18

      Thundering hooves, wailing women

      The plot description doesn't say it all, by any means. Thundering hooves, veiled and wailing women, desolate landscapes with waving seas of grass and the occasional forbidding stone fortress or burned house, this movie appeals to nearly all of the five senses. It's been three years since I saw it first, and scenes still flash vividly through my head. The harsh faces of the guards, the equally harsh faces of the prisoners. Blunt and brutal deaths. And overhead, the sun burning down, always.
      7Balthazar-5

      Ideological in a stylistic way

      Life comes along at a variable pace, and we are constantly re-positioning our gaze to obtain the optimum information in order to understand the situation we are in. This is replicated in the cinema through the mise en scène and editing of the scenes. Since the 1930s there has been an either explicit or implicit debate as to whether editing within the scene is a good or bad thing, with Andre Bazin rooting for the unity of the image against montage (editing). Fifteen years before this film, Hitchcock set down a marker with 'Rope' (and to a lesser extent 'Under Capricorn') that scenes, indeed whole films can be made without much in the way of editing, by simply organising the action and camera movement to reveal the same information in a more continuous way.

      Enter Miklos Jancso. With this film he became something of a celebrity in intellectually active film circles by structuring it to be shot in the main, in long takes. Does it work? Well, it works in one way, and that is that it draws attention to the Hungarian plains in which it was shot and which, during the numerous long slow pans that we see, seem to stretch forever across the landscape. Looking at it again after almost forty years, I find it difficult to believe that it made such a big kerfuffle. Long held takes DO enhance suspense - hence Hitchcock's temporary enthusiasm for them - but they seem artificial as they do not mimic the action of the eye, which is always on the lookout for something more interesting elsewhere (hence Hitchcock's enthusiasm being only temporary!).

      The 'rounding-up' of prisoners that it portrays is an OK subject for a film, but I think we would have been much more emotionally involved with the characters if we had been treated to reaction shots and the like.

      Still, see it as a theoretical/historical curiosity.
      9pocketapocketaqueep

      Raw, simple, visually stunning

      I took a punt on this one needing out of the house on a holiday Monday. It was short enough, ranked in certain quarters as a classic, and had made it onto those most worthy of cinéaste lists as an undeservedly overlooked masterpiece. It sounded like one of those films, like Koyaanisqatsi, that, like Twain's classics, everyone wants to have watched and nobody much wants to watch; one which I would sit through with a lot of deep and meaningful thoughts in my mind, which would stay with me for years but be approximately as enjoyable as the last three fifths of all those long form essays on climate change, crypto currencies or the situation in the Ukraine I mean to get round to. Some of the write ups on it made it sound as if there was barely any dialogue.

      In fact, though the dialogue is reasonably sparse, there are few long scenes without any dialogue. Indeed it is important enough that the subtitles caused me problems. I have been watching films with Czech subtitles for a few years now and have few problems with that from a language point of view. What I do tend to notice, though, is that the comprehensibility of subtitles varies widely. Sometimes subtitles flash up and are cancelled so quickly you don't have time to scan them. This can be the case even where they are not replaced with others. The viewer in these films begins to distrust the subtitles and scans the text quicker than is natural, taking little in even in those moments where the subtitles remain in place. This is far more often a problem than the poor idiom often seen in Czech subtitles. I don't know much about the technology of subtitles, but it looked as if the text was applied to the copy of the film in this instance, probably many years ago, and being essentially burned into the film itself, parts of the text disappeared for a number of frames. I missed a number of exchanges because of this and would like to watch the film again with English subtitles for this reason.

      I'm in two minds, too, about the need to read up on the background of the film beforehand. As with a Forward in a classic novel, I find that knowing too much about a film before first seeing it can detract from its immediacy. With The Round-up, though, I might perhaps have benefited from knowing a little more. At least with a film, and certainly a film of this length, I can see it again more easily than I might find time to read a Victorian novel.

      Knowing as little as I did about the background, however, it is certainly true that was plenty to keep my interest, both on the human level (which in places I would have understood better had the subtitles been a touch better), and on the visual level. As far as the human level goes, there are scenes here that could gainfully be projected in lectures on game theory and the prisoner's dilemma. The psychological methods used by the captors are brutally effective and it is impossible to watch without thinking how well you would fare in such circumstances. Purely aesthetically, both the landscape here and the people are so full of character. János Gajdar's face is just one of those that fills the screen and though stoic, almost static much of the time, speaks of many years of rough breaks and a dangerous contained emotion.

      They don't make films like this anymore in part because they don't make men like that anymore.

      More like this

      The Red and the White
      7.5
      The Red and the White
      Red Psalm
      6.7
      Red Psalm
      Sodrásban
      7.4
      Sodrásban
      Electra, My Love
      7.0
      Electra, My Love
      Sinbad
      7.4
      Sinbad
      The Confrontation
      6.4
      The Confrontation
      My Way Home
      7.4
      My Way Home
      Silence and Cry
      6.8
      Silence and Cry
      Isten hozta örnagy úr
      8.0
      Isten hozta örnagy úr
      Love
      7.8
      Love
      Merry-Go-Round
      7.7
      Merry-Go-Round
      Oldás és kötés
      7.2
      Oldás és kötés

      Related interests

      Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight (2016)
      Drama
      Liam Neeson in Schindler's List (1993)
      History
      Band of Brothers (2001)
      War
      John Wayne and Harry Carey Jr. in The Searchers (1956)
      Western

      Storyline

      Edit

      Did you know

      Edit
      • Trivia
        Voted as one of the "12 Best Hungarian Films 1948-1968" by Hungarian filmmakers and critics ("Budapest 12") in 1968 and then again as one of the "12 Best Hungarian Films" ("New Budapest 12") in 2000.
      • Connections
        Featured in Fejezetek a film történetéböl: A magyar film 1957-1970 (1990)

      Top picks

      Sign in to rate and Watchlist for personalized recommendations
      Sign in

      FAQ9

      • How long is The Round-Up?Powered by Alexa

      Details

      Edit
      • Release date
        • January 6, 1966 (Hungary)
      • Country of origin
        • Hungary
      • Language
        • Hungarian
      • Also known as
        • Ljudi bez nade
      • Filming locations
        • Hungary
      • Production company
        • MAFILM Stúdió 4
      • See more company credits at IMDbPro

      Tech specs

      Edit
      • Runtime
        • 1h 30m(90 min)
      • Color
        • Black and White
      • Sound mix
        • Mono
      • Aspect ratio
        • 2.35 : 1

      Contribute to this page

      Suggest an edit or add missing content
      • Learn more about contributing
      Edit page

      More to explore

      Recently viewed

      Please enable browser cookies to use this feature. Learn more.
      Get the IMDb App
      Sign in for more accessSign in for more access
      Follow IMDb on social
      Get the IMDb App
      For Android and iOS
      Get the IMDb App
      • Help
      • Site Index
      • IMDbPro
      • Box Office Mojo
      • License IMDb Data
      • Press Room
      • Advertising
      • Jobs
      • Conditions of Use
      • Privacy Policy
      • Your Ads Privacy Choices
      IMDb, an Amazon company

      © 1990-2025 by IMDb.com, Inc.