József Romvári

A short portrait of Hungarian production designer József Romvári, made by his granddaughter. Included as a special bonus feature on the release of Mephisto, Confidence, and Colonel Redl, by director István Szabó through Kino Lorber.

A prominent conductor's nervous breakdown leads to love in this thoughtful Hungarian romantic drama. For sometime, Landos, a noted conductor, has suffered anxiety and a lack of confidence about his work. The problem is made worse by his wife's successful dental practice. Eventually it becomes too overwhelming and the conductor is sent to a mental hospital for rest. There he encounters clinical psychologist Andrea Novak. At first she seems colder than alpine snow, but when he sneaks out to return to work and she finds him there, things quickly turn hot. The two become engulfed in passion that they ignore their own spouses and professions, causing Novak to be formally reprimanded. Eventually Landos finds himself forced to choose between his wife and Novak. Unfortunately, he loves them both. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Based on the true story of a Russian serial killer who, over many years, claimed victim to over 50 people. His victims were mostly under the age of 17. In what was then a communists state, the police investigations were hampered by bureaucracy, incompetence and those in power. The story is told from the viewpoint of the detective in charge of the case.

Hungary, end of World War II. Five Hungarian soldiers desert their troop which has been directed to Germany. They are escaping with the help of a stamp and unfilled travelling warrants, trying to survive until the war ends.

Biography of the African-American who became a major performer in the Paris cabarets of the 1920s and 1930s. The film follows her life beginning as a struggling performer in 1917 St. Louis, her frustrations leading to her move to France, and follows to her death in 1975. Written by John Sacksteder

1958. In the cell of the condemned, seven men await the signs of an approaching execution. All of them recall their pasts and envision their wish-dreams.

In trying to bring a former concentration camp commandant to justice, Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal uncovers the tragic story of two lovers separated by the war.

The CIA hears of a KGB scheme to assassinate the Soviet General Secretary and enlists Stoner, an agent retired for 10 years, to go to Russia to investigate. He verifies the plot, but then has trouble leaving the country. In the meantime, the U.S. policy makers struggle over whether or not to inform the Soviets of the plot. Stoner's problems are complicated by the renewal of an affair with Anna, a Russian, as he tries to convince her to defect.

In a border town two sons of the local commander using stolen arms take hostages of eighteen girls in a dormitory, because they want to go West by plane.

A biographical portrayal of Simon Wiesenthal, famous Nazi Hunter. From his imprisonment in a Nazi Concentration Camp, the film follows his liberation and his rise to become one of the leading Nazi hunters in the world, bringing such criminals to justice as Adolf Eichmann and Klaus Barbee. (Written by Anthony Hughes)

A man's story parallels Hitler's rise. Austrian Klaus Schneider, wounded in World War I, recovers in the care of Dr. Emil Bettleheim. Bettleheim discovers that Schneider possesses powers of empathy and of clairvoyance, such that could aid suicidal patients. After the war, with one friend as his manager and another as his lover, Schneider changes his name to Eric Jan Hanussen and goes to Berlin, as a hypnotist and clairvoyant performing in halls and theaters. He always speaks the truth, which brings him to the attention of powerful Nazis. He predicts their rise (good propaganda for them) and their violence (not so good). He's in pain and at risk. What is Hanussen's future?

Contemporary genre-painting of a Hungarian "middle class" family of four. The scene is the villa apartment almost finished, where the tourist guide mother, father who also works for the second economy and the lonely big girl preparing for her maturity examination turn up alternatively. It is only the teen-ager boy who really "lives" in this place: instead of attending school he stays home all day and observes the life of the surrounding by a self-made periscope. Internal communication of the family is accomplished in writing, on the pin-up board in the kitchen.

Set during the fading glory of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the film tells of the rise and fall of Alfred Redl, an ambitious young officer who proceeds up the ladder to become head of the Secret Police only to become ensnared in political deception.

This movie is about the love and protection of a man from another culture for the lowly horsemen of the the plains in Hungary during World War II.

More than a storyline with a beginning, middle, and end, this tale of a foundry worker who engages a woman -- and fellow worker -- to do housekeeping for him is a tale that holds up the Hungarian social system against the morality of an exploitative male-female relationship. After his wife dies, the rough-cut and intentionally nameless "man" (Jozsef Madaras) eventually coerces the "woman" (Julianna Nyako) into doing his housework for a small remuneration. Everything goes along passably well for awhile, until the man adds in more household responsibility in the form of chickens to raise. Due to extra work at the factory, the woman cannot tend to the chickens as she should and the result is that some of them die. The man is furious, verbally abuses her, and then rapes her. Later, the woman discovers she is pregnant, with dire consequences.

During the rising of nazism, Sylvia, a rich but sterile woman, needs an heir to inherit her father's money. So she bribes Irene, a Jewish girl, to have a child by her husband.

Dini goes to Sweden illegally and abandons his fiancée, Mari. After several months a young Finnish businessman called Pekka arrives in Budapest, carrying a letter and package from Dini. The sympathetic Pekka is judged by the friends of Mari to be suitable for the task of a nominal marriage, by which Mari could get out legally to Dini.

Janos and Kata are thrown together during the Second World War and forced to pose as husband and wife to hide from the Nazis. The intensity and suffocating intimacy of their new relationship and the circumstances in which they find themselves, forces them to confront past prejudices and assumptions and challenge what they truly believe.

In the late 17th century, Hungary moved from Turkish to Austrian domination, becoming a key part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In this story, which takes place shortly after that time, three outlaws murder a group of people on their way to a wedding. One young man was a slave travelling with the group to entertain them with his skills as a trumpeter. The outlaws spare him for the same reason. He allows himself to believe that they are really an unattached group of independence-fighters, but after seeing their brutal and callous ways, he cannot believe that they are good men, and he turns them in to the authorities. At that point, he is unnerved to discover how nobly they bear the rigors of captivity. ~

"Budapest Tales" is about a group of people (consisting of Szabo regular Andras Balint along with Ildiko Bansagi and Karoly Kovacs) who find a broken down tram while trying to go to the city. The people band together and try to get the tram back on the train tracks and head towards the city. Along this journey the passengers encounter many people who join them on the tram. What started out as only a handful of people has now turned into a small village. As the people travel on to the city each person takes on certain roles and through the course of time these roles will change. Some people fall in love, others out of love, and a few even die. But life goes on. The people keep the tram going hoping to reach Budapest.

News spreads like wildfire through the streets of Lubló: the ghost of recently deceased Mihály Kaszperek has been seen emerging now and then around the town. He pays off his debts, seeks out his debtors, flirts with his widow, then before sunrise he gallops off seated back to front on his steed. However, it soon transpires that the gold he is using is fake. Naturally, a counterfeiting phantom quickly attracts the attention of the authorities as well. Detective Jakab Strang is given the task of arresting the wayward dearly departed.

While awaiting his release from the Soviet detention camp he is being held in, a half-starved refugee (Andras Ambrus) finds that an error has been made and his name is not on the to-be-released list. It is then that he is forced to assume the identity of a dead man whose name is on the list. Ambrus at first refuses, but because he was an orphan and cannot produce evidence of his true identity, he has no other choice. However, when he returns to the outer world and the community he was raised in, he is greeted with suspicion. When he tries to claim his part-ownership of a farm from his adopted uncle, he is refused and beaten by farmhands the uncle sets on him.

Bátky János a 20th century intellectual studies the secret of the Rosicrucians in London libraries during the day and in the evening takes pleasure in the "decent" everyday joys offered by the fair sex. He gets involved in the wildest ghost-story in the mysterious Wales castle of the Pendragons, where Earl of Gwynnedd from the 18th century is making experiments to prove his ancestors' slogan, "the resurrection of the body". In the meantime St. Claire, a beautiful, demonic woman and her companions try to kill him for the huge legacy.

In the summer of 1944, a Hungarian soldier commits a murder to earn a short leave from the front, but instead of returning, he chooses to desert. He flees into the desolate Carpathian Mountains with his elderly grandmother, searching for a hidden cave where his parents are rumored to be hiding from the war. Convinced that the world is ending, the pair struggles through the brutal, wintry landscape in a desperate attempt to find sanctuary and outrun the consequences of his actions.

The scene is Ukraine. In 1943, after the Hungarian' defeat at the river Don, soldier Balogh decides to visit his family.

Mr. Dezső and Rezső are selecting the heroes for their new operetta. They represent different tastes and styles, and keep arguing about the casting of the four men and four women.

Karoly Makk's heartbreaking story of two unmarried sisters who cast wistful glances back at their lives, but still believe in hope and love, earned an Academy Award Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1974. In this follow-up to the director's internationally acclaimed Love, Makk once again exhibits his extraordinary skills at drawing emotionally compelling performances from his talented female leads. Makk's film opposes the bleakness of the outside world with passion, love, and loyalty.

The film is set in Budapest, 1924. Laundryman Ede Minarik's only passion is football. His dream is to see his team, Csabagyöngye, qualify for the first division. For this goal he would be willing to sacrifice everything he has. But he has nothing, even footballers just barely. The team is just like the times. But still, "we need a team!"

On one hot summer night, the residents of a Hungarian apartment house slated for demolition restlessly revisit their haunted pasts as they face an uncertain future. In a gently turning kaleidoscope of dream imagery, regret-laden nostalgia and painstakingly intimate detail, the looming wrecking ball pales in significance to the accumulated experiences each dreamer revisits. Pre-war prejudice, occupying Nazis and Stalinist deprivations all come and go as each tenant’s backward glance yields moments of aching sensuality, infectious exuberance and catastrophic loss.

The story of the film takes place in 1929 in a model prison providing a kind of reflection how society works out there. Udvardi, the weakling and indulgent director is experimenting with putting in practice a kind of pseudo-humanist utopia about the institution of a 'civilised prison'.

Marci, an impertinent crook buries his drunk parents and chooses to wander instead of becoming an apprentice.

This film describes the narrator's childhood, the years before and after the Hungarian Soviet Republic, in a burlesque and fabulous style and with the humour of a child's fantasy.

This Hungarian film chronicles the slow deterioration in the life of Juli, a farmer's wife. As the countryside grows ever more deserted because people are moving to towns or large collective farms, she spends more and more time alone. Despite her best efforts to appreciate her situation, her despair grows. The loneliness is briefly interrupted when she and her husband take in an old woman and care for her, but the woman dies. Shortly after her son visits, she is killed in an accident which may have been a suicide. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

The week-days of a youth-camp, playing democracy, are depicted in this documentarist satire. Due to faulty organisation, the Budapest high-school students get only working tools, but no work to do. The camp leadership tries to cover up facts and urges them to be initiated into "community life".

The film describes the general situation and conditions of the middle-aged intellectuals.

Luca, who regularly visits her bedridden mother-in-law, hides from her the fact that János, his son, has been arrested on a trumped up political charge.

Aunt Ilka, who likes company, opens her house standing in the middle of a six-acre rose garden in the little town for the golden youth of the town. As a result of her benevolence, the tenants are in the position to adore not only the roses but a nice bunch of to-be-married girls of the town.

The film is a story of a double journey. The main character of the first journey is the author himself, who, while sitting in his customary café, suddenly realises that he has hallucinations. The psychologist reassures him that all this is merely repression. The symptoms, however, appear again. Soon it turns out that the author has a brain tumour. Professor Pötzl in Vienna suggests operation right away. The intervention, through which he is awake, is carried out in a Stockholm clinic.

The protagonist of this farce is the enthusiastic, bald, spectacled Krebsz, an employee at the Prime and Sample Institute. He alerts the whole village to organise a beauty contest in the weed-field of Balatonszutykos. Hoping to win the grand prize, the leading role in a two-hour colour-film, the girls make all efforts and use all their tricks.

The Tóth family resides in Northern Hungary. The couple has a daughter and a son, the latter a member of the armed forces. When his weary major is ordered to take a vacation, the son talks him into a visit to his family home. Hilarity ensues when the Tóths go overboard trying to make things pleasant for the visiting major in hopes of an easier life for their son, the soldier.

Five social misfits undergo cryogenic suspension. When they awake in the far distant future, they find a world devastated by nuclear war. Yet they discover that each of them has some personal involvement - and responsibility - for the series of the events that ended in the destruction of the world they knew.

In turn-of-the-century Budapest, teenage gangs the Paul Street Boys and the Red Shirts have been skirmishing over a vacant lot. When the Red Shirts decide to drive the Paul Street Boys out, they appoint small, sickly Nemescek to spy on their opponents.

This ironic comedy is set in the god-forsaken Kiskúnbékás, at the end of the fifties. There are no jobs, the town's "golden team", who once were third class national soccer players have scattered

The engineer Ambrus has been suspended in his job because he publicly called the attention of the customers to a construction mistake of some goods designed to be exported. His immediate boss learns the news on a business trip to Paris. He meets his old friend Lendvay, an emigrant from Hungary, and his French wife in a cellar bar. After their talk Benkő starts seeing things in a different perspective. When he returns home, he decides to take a stand for Ambrus against Ferenczi, the general director, despite his wife's and the old director's advice.

During World War II, a young poet remembers his love on a train bound for the front. He spent the days before his enlistment with his sweetheart. Poetry and love bring them momentary happiness. Bálint does not want to be separated from the girl, so they run away from the draft notice. Then, the girl disappears...

The changing and turbulent history of Hungary is seen through the eyes of three men over a 30-year period in this somber drama. The three recall the highlights of their lives in flashbacks as they reminisce in the mid 1960s. The venerable trio begin their story in the 1930s, through World War II, and the decade beyond the communist invasion of 1956.

Mihály, a retired foundryman has brought up his sons in a very disciplined and strict way, and as a result they have become a doctor, an engineer, and a teacher. However, his half orphan grandson, Misi, has been spoilt, and become skilled in nothing else really but riding his motorbike and going to parties. He has been involved in shady businesses a number of times already. Having experienced so many difficulties, privation and hardship in his own life and now seeing Misi's irresponsible lifestyle, the old man's bitterness is growing day by day.

Against the backdrop of the Adolph Eichmann trials, an elderly paraplegic pharmacist is summoned to the police station, where he believes that his hidden wartime guilt has caught up with him, unaware that it is all in fact an elaborate practical joke.

When András, Albert and Bence are on a cycling tour around Lake Balaton, their dreams come true. Sunshine, beach and pretty girls. András and his younger brother run after the same girl, Eszter. András persuade his brother not to pinch the girl. András pick her up one night and split up with her next day. Eszter follows the boy, but András sends her away...

In 1956, a crusading newspaper reporter covers the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Initially critical of the communists, the feature later espouses the virtues of social changes implemented since the invasion.

Kiss, an engineer, accompanies his wife to the maternity ward. He wants to leave the woman because while he was away in Brazil, she did not undergo an abortion as they had agreed before. While he is packing up at home, the memories of the sweet events of their life together keep coming to him, one after the other.

Terpinkó, the bragging man of muscle likes womanising linked with betting: conquering is a great fun for him. He bet one to a hundred on his new boss, Éva. But the wife of the engineer handles all his tricks with annoying benevolence. Terpinkó falls in love with her and therefore he cannot stand her not returning his feelings.

A group of students cope with the disappearance of their friend.

The film depicts the period between 1945-60 through the life of a communist couple. Barna Judit, just released from a concentration camp and Horváth László, with an illegal past are brought together by the communist movement. They study and make plans together in the hope of a future that will make sense. The marriage they just entered, however, gets ruined soon by the events of history.

Andris is almost an adolescent boy. He would need the trust and encouragement of his family. But his father is too much preoccupied with his moral problems in his job. He has the choice either to make a fuss about the corruption discovered at the company or he tries to cover it up skilfully.

A comedy about the organisation of agricultural co-operatives. In the village of "Rendes", everybody has already entered the co-op, only the stubborn farmer, Bódog Balogh continues to resist. The leadership plays all their tricks and uses all their efforts, but all in vain.

1920 in a mining town in the country-side. The team of children led by Ferkó Boda fish guns and a flag of Red soldiers out of the local lake.

Klári, the dancer of the ice revue, is pursued by a mysterious admirer and his roses. Her husband, Rezső, is about to lose his wits with jealousy.

A Hungarian doctor, Dr. Hajnal, who always considered himself out of politics, falls in love with the Soviet intelligence agent, the radio operator Alba, operating in the occupied Wehrmacht of Hungary. By accident, the radio operator is hiding in the doctor’s house. Hainal is drawn into a life-threatening confrontation with the Germans. A difficult question arises before him: to remain neutral when people die around and Alba is threatened with death, or to remain an honest person — to make his personal choice and take part in this struggle.

Most of her colleagues take Mária, the new teacher to be a communist party-worker, only Irma and the drawing teacher Zoli treat her kindly. Mária starts working with great enthusiasm, and her class learns to love her in a short time.

Feri Noszty forges bills of exchange, which is an unforgivable sin in his circle. The family, to pay the debt and save the boy's honour, cash in their only fortune by marrying Vilma, Feri's sister, to a wealthy man. But this will not save Feri, who must resign his commission as an officer. He gets a job as a magistrate, but the income does not satisfy the young man's needs. All that is left is a good marriage and a huge dowry.

Following his wedding, Feri left the co-operative and is now working on the land of his father-in-law. Tóth is extremely wilful and thrifty, working from early morning to late night, pushing his family as well.

About the life of young people in Hungary in the late 50s, their joys, hopes and dreams. When Joly entered the factory, she wanted to be as cheerful and carefree as the other girls, and she didn't tell anyone that she had a son. And now, when the wedding day with Ferenc is almost set, Yoli walks around sad and confused. She doesn't know how Feri will take the news of her son. She is afraid that Feri, who loves and trusts her very much, will never understand or forgive her. But Feri turns out to be a real man, and Yoli together with little Ali finds her true happiness.

October, 1956. Colonel lieutenant Szabó sends a platoon with the mission of calming the people demonstrating in the town. The platoon is lined up under the command of Lieutenant Csendes and the soldiers aim at the demonstrators. Szusza Kis changes sides, and Csendes is unable to shoot at his childhood mate. They withdraw.