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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

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    Top cast32

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    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
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      Featured reviews

      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.
      8JohnF-8

      Definitely A Film You Won't Forget

      Miklos Jancso's The Round Up is not concerned with character development or a complex plot. While this may annoy some, it suits this film perfectly fine. The movie feels very cold and remote, almost Kubrickian in content and style. Surprisingly, there is very little violence in the film although it seems like that the film is very brutal. Perhaps this is because of emotional hopelessness most of the characters experience in the film. A very worthwhile experience overall, rent it, although just don't be prepared to come away smiling.
      9dromasca

      Kafka in the Puszta

      Cinematography in Eastern Europe during the 40 years of the Communist regimes was subject to very close ideological and artistic supervision, as the rulers understood very well the power of cinema as a propaganda tool, either explicit in the newsreels or documentary films or implicit as mass entertainment. Yet, talents of exception existed, cinema schools and exceptional directors and actors made memorable movies which fought censorship and bureaucratic intrusion to make films written in their own language - a language that was eluding direct critics of the oppressive systems but were yet establishing through image and visual metaphors the communication between the artists and their audiences. Although lesser known than their Polish and Czech counterparts, the Hungarian school had also at least two top level directors - Miklós Jancsó and István Szabó, and was also continuing a school of film makers and cinematographers who had made it to Hollywood in the first half of the century. 'The Round-Up' (the original title is 'Szegénylegények' which would translate approximately as 'The Poor Lads') is one of the best if not the best film of Miklós Jancsó, considered also as one of the best Hungarian movies ever made. I have seen it 52 years after its release, and all the reasons and the exceptional qualities are still here.

      In one of the few concessions that Jancsó may have made to the ideological kommissars the introductory part of the film places the story in a very specific historic moment - 1869, two decades after the revolutions that shook Europe in the middle of the 19th century and which led to the formation of the dual Austro-Hungarian empire. As the last pockets of resistance were liquidated, the remaining patriots were gathered in a sort of concentration camps in the middle of the endless Hungarian plains (the 'puszta'). No means were spared to identify and eliminate the heads of the revolt, including torture, blackmail, and the use of informing traitors. However everything in the tone, the style, the text indicates that Jancsó was aiming higher and was telling an universal story, one which is the same as the one told by many survivors of camps and prisons under authoritarian regimes at many times and in many places in the world. But even if the allusions to the lost fight for freedom are to be read in the context of the Hungarian history, we should not forget that the film was made in a country that only ten years earlier was invaded and its revolution crushed by another neighboring empire - the Soviet Union.

      There are several reasons that make the watching of this film a cinematographic experience that is hard to forget. First of all the cinematography. 'The Round-Up' is filmed in black-and-white and the perfect composition of each frame, the dynamic of the movements and the aesthetic expression remind the early films of Ingmar Bergman. The setting is majestic with the horizon of the Hungarian plains visible almost all the time and building a permanent contrast with the concentrationary universe the characters are living in. There is a lot of suffering and there are some hard scenes in the film, but all these are sublimate and the heroes (even the villain ones) seem to keep a trace of dignity at any moment. The dialogs bring to mind Kafka and other writers who brought up in a more or less visible manner the absurd language of the bureaucratic and repressive systems. At the time of its release and more than half of century later 'The Round-Up' stands as a powerful and straggled shout for freedom.
      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.

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      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
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      Western

      Storyline

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      Did you know

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      • 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)

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      FAQ9

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      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

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