There’s a lot that’s good about Foto Háber (aka Haber’s Photo Shop), a pithy Hungarian spy thriller from 1963, but it does have one obstacle to surmount. Of which more later.
One of the best things is Zoltán Latinovits as the cool, calm spy infiltrating an espionage ring that steals state secrets. Or secrets, let’s just say secrets, of which more, also, later.
We meet Gábor Csiky (Latinovits) in a prison where he’s introduced as an ex-priest and theologian – the other inmates refer to him as “Reverend”. When they ask him what he’s in there for, Gábor replies “political stuff”, modestly. One inmate points out that, rationally, all crime, no matter how petty, is political, since it undermines the basis of the Communist Hungarian state. Said without a trace of irony – Hungarian audiences in 1963 brought their own.
Anti-establishment bona fides established and his sentence served, Gábor is soon back on the outside and making contact with a spy ring selling secrets to the enemy. The ring operates out of the photo shop fronted by bluff Mr Háber (Miklós Szakáts) and is run like a terrorist cell. Háber has no idea who his superior officer is. He just gets his orders from a shadowy contact and follows them.
Gábor has soon made himself useful to Háber and his small team of accomplices: the dangerous Hosszú (Attila Nagy); the suspicious and seedy Schmidt (László Csákányi); and the attractive Anna (Éva Ruttkai), who immediately makes a play for the ex-priest, a clerical notch on the bedpost is one worth having, her body language seems to suggest.
From here the usual embedded-outsider jeopardy. Will they find out who he is? Will he flush himself out by refusing to do something he’s been ordered to do?
1963 is the year that ex-spy John Le Carré published The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, a corrective to Ian Fleming’s novels about bed-hopping exotic spy James Bond. Dr No, the first Bond movie, had come out the year before. Foto Háber loiters at the Le Carré end of the spectrum. Listening devices and microfilm are about as gadgety as this movie gets.
Would it be too fanciful to suggest that director Martin Ritt, when he brought Le Carré’s novel to the screen two years later, had the bleak, subdued Foto Háber somewhere on his mood board? For starters, his The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was shot in black and white – he insisted on it against Le Carré’s wishes.
Another of Foto Háber’s pluses is its crisp and smart cinematography (by István Hildebrand). It’s also blessed with sharp and fast-paced direction – director Zoltán Várkonyi does not hang about and isn’t vaguely interested in visual poetics.
To the film’s potential problem: audience sympathy for its key figure, Gábor, a spy in the employ of the Hungarian government. In real life this was a regime re-imposed on Hungary only seven years earlier after it had tried to break away from the Eastern Bloc in what came to be known as the Hungarian Uprising. That ended with the USSR invading the country, Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest, thousand of Hungarians dead and 200,000 fleeing the country.
Its solution is a fudge: though it seems obvious that Gábor is working for the Hungarian government, it’s never explicitly stated. We don’t know whose secrets Háber’s spy ring are stealing – they might be Hungarian ones for sale to the Americans, say. Or Soviet ones. Which would put a completely different complexion on things and would make Háber’s gang part of some patriotic resistance movement. Unlikely, granted, though the ambiguity means a reading like that is there for the taking.
So, a movie about spying made with spylike subterfuge at its core, this makes Foto Háber an unusual proposition. Add to that the surprisingly upbeat backdrop of Hungary in the 1960s, specifically the Budapest of cafés, restaurants, bright lights and fun, and it’s doubly fascinating. And talking of which, a “well I never” reveal towards the end.
Foto Háber aka Faber’s Photo Shop – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2023
