Hanussen

István Szabó: Mephisto/Colonel Redl/Hanussen

by
Klaus Maria Brandauer in white-face make-up in Mephisto

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 … Read more

Hanussen

by
Hanussen on stage

Magic and the Nazis. Hanussen, the bizarre and true story of Eric Jan Hanussen, is ideal big screen material, you’d have thought, since the Austrian stage hypnotist and soothsayer was a charismatic performer who held Germans in his thrall in the dying days of the Weimar Republic and into the Nazi era. The parallels with Hitler are obvious, and once you add in the rumour that Hanussen was the man who taught Hitler his techniques of mass manipulation and crowd control, it has all the ingredients of a story with a ready audience. However, there have been only two attempts at it. A 1955 version which seems to have vanished into the ether, … Read more