DVD Reviews: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, The Prisoner, Guilty of Treason - Page 4

The Soviet tanks arrived four days later, however, and the Cardinal sought asylum in the American Embassy. He was allowed to stay but refused to leave the country unless he was rehabilitated. He lived in the Embassy until 1971 when the Vatican finally convinced him to leave (he settled in Vienna). When the Communist government granted him a pardon, he refused it.

Peter Glenville's The Prisoner (1955), a fictionalized version of Mindszenty's interrogation and trial (made before the events of 1956, as Pauline Kael noted in her 12 December 1970 New Yorker review of Costa-Gavras's The Confession), features an unnamed Cardinal (Alec Guinness), a national hero of the anti-fascist resistance, and an unnamed Interrogator (Jack Hawkins), a (presumably former) aristocrat who brings his considerable intellectual sophistication to bear on the brutal work of getting the proud, strong-minded prelate to confess to invented crimes against the unnamed Stalinist state.

Guinness's Cardinal is as erect as a chessman, aloof, caustic, and battle-hardened. He was imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo without breaking and does not imagine the Interrogator can do worse or get more out of him. (Mindszenty had not only been imprisoned by the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross party in 1944 — for refusing to permit a Mass to be said in celebration of the deportation of Hungarian Jews — he had been held by the Hungarian Communist government in 1919 as well. He was a lifelong lightning rod for totalitarian despotism.)

The Interrogator's experience fighting the Nazis was less harrowing than the Cardinal's, and in addition the Cardinal is confident of his moral edge - he refers to the Nazis as the Interrogator's "predecessors." (The Hungarian Communist secret police, the AVO, did, in fact, use the same HQ as the Arrow Cross party, the notorious 60 Andrássy Street in Budapest, now a museum called The House of Terror.)

In a variation on Mindszenty's note, the Cardinal says as he's being arrested that any confession will be a lie or the result of human weakness. Cardinal Mindszenty was truncheoned and stupefied with drugs, but The Prisoner's choice of "human weakness" is judicious, as a dramatic rather than a historical matter. The Interrogator wants a "clean" confession that will seem uncoerced. Why he would care seems to fly in the face of Stalinist judicial history, but then Mindszenty said in his 1974 Memoirs that the physical abuse was stopped two days before his first appearance in court so that he would be physically capable of playing his part in the show trial. In any event, the Interrogator believes he can't get the Cardinal to confess by merely inflicting physical pain. The Cardinal must want to abase himself publicly, and getting him to involves not just psychological torture (sleep deprivation, etc.) but getting to know the great man intimately enough to crack his pride.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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