A neat Blu-ray box set of some of Hungarian director István Szabó’s best – probably his best known – movies. Mephisto (1981), Colonel Redl (1985) and Hanussen (1988) all star Klaus Maria Brandauer, all three are co-written with Péter Dobai and they’re all shot by Lajos Koltai. Thematically they all deal with essentially the same issue too – personal integrity, though they come at it from different directions.
To précis the plots, Mephisto is a Nazi-era tale of an actor who is “invited” to endorse the new regime in return for career success. Colonel Redl follows a traitor on his path towards sending thousands of countrymen to their deaths in the dog days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Hanussen Szabó is back with the Nazis, following a soldier wounded in the First World War who uses his knack for stage mentalism to climb to the top of the political tree – the read-across to Adolf Hitler is obvious.
Each man has a guilty secret – Mephisto has no personality when he’s not playing a role, Redl is gay, Hanussen is Jewish. Lies or concealment are at the heart of each story, and so are the performances by Brandauer, whose immense skill keeps the audience onside with all-too-human characters who are, at bottom, fairly despicable.
For my money Redl is the best of the three, Hanussen the least, though it’s still a superb showcase of Brandauer’s abilities and Szabó’s film-making, which is lush and beautiful and jumps from one meticulously staged set piece to the next.
These are big films of the old school, shot on well dressed, beautifully lit sets and wrangled onto the screen by technicians who really know their stuff. Mephisto won the Oscar for best foreign language movie in 1982, edging out Cross of Iron, Three Brothers, The Boat Is Full and Muddy River. Brandauer was not even nominated for the best actor Oscar, further proof that when it comes to the Academy Awards, it’s the acting gongs that are the least reliable as indicators of quality.
When I last watched Hanussen in 2021, I complained about the poor quality of the image. It was shockingly woolly and looked like a transfer from a VHS. In those days there seemed to be no way of getting hold of a decent physical copy – DVD or Blu-ray – and the chances of it turning up on streaming (Mubi perhaps excepted) were vanishingly slight.
That’s all rectified with these new 4K restorations, which were done by Hungary’s National Film Institute and were supervised by cinematographer Koltai himself. They are so beautifully done they shimmer. In the UK (and eventually in the US) they’ve been boxed together by curatorial boutique outfit Second Run, who are always a name to look out for when it comes to good “foreign” (Eastern Europe in particular) movies from off the beaten track. This release comes with a quartet of shorts, booklets containing background essays on the films and a documentary about the production designer József Romvári, whose contribution to all three films is outstanding.
It’s a fine package and ideal for the Szabó fan or for anyone wanting to learn more about the national cinema of a country that was still struggling away under Soviet domination when Mephisto, Colonel Red and Hanussen were made. There must be something in the water in Hungary – so many brilliant film-makers for such a relatively small country.
István Szabó: Mephisto/Colonel Redl/Hanussen – Watch /buy at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025