The movie opens today at the Wilmette Theatre. So far as I can tell, this is its first American theatrical booking. But listen to this: In New Zealand, it ran for more than a year and became a local phenomenon in Auckland.
The story begins in Budapest in the 1930s, where Laszlo Szabo (Joachim Krol) runs a restaurant celebrated for its beef rolls. His hostess is the young and fetching Ilona (Erika Marozsan), and he is in love with her. Together they hire a piano player named Andras (Stefano Dionisi), and Andras falls in love with Ilona, and she with him, but she still loves Laszlo, and since they all like one another, they arrive at a cozy accommodation.
A regular customer is a German named Hans Wieck (Ben Becker), who also falls in love with Ilona, and says if she will marry him, he will build Germany's largest import-export business, just for her. But as she already has her hands full, she turns him down.
Andras, meanwhile, composes a song named "Gloomy Sunday" which sweeps the world and which he has to play every night at the restaurant. Soon a legend grows up around the song, that people who hear it commit suicide. Strangely enough, this detail is based on fact; it was written in 1933 by Rezso Seress, became an international hit, was recorded by such artists as Artie Shaw and Billie Holiday (and later Bjork and Elvis Costello), and banned by the BBC because of its allegedly depressing effect. On the night that Ilona rejects Hans, indeed, he casts himself into the Danube and is hauled out by Laszlo. You see what I mean about melodrama.
The war comes. It is well known what the Nazis are doing to the Jews, but Laszlo, who is Jewish, has never given much thought to religion and believes such things will never happen in Hungary. He has more than one chance to escape but remains, and his restaurant becomes even more popular in wartime. A regular customer is none other than Hans Wieck, now in charge of the Hungarian final solution, and he gives Laszlo an exemption; his beef rolls are a contribution to the war effort. Wieck, too, is said to be based on a historical figure, a Nazi named Kurt Becher who held a similar job in Budapest.
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