DVD Reviews: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, The Prisoner, Guilty of Treason - Page 8

The Prisoner takes its anti-Communism for granted and doesn't go into the political situation Mindszenty was caught up in, much less the ideas that motivated him - the historical importance of Catholicism to the Hungarian nation. Surprisingly, there was a Hollywood movie about Mindszenty made shortly after his trial that is much more invested in his cause: Guilty of Treason, a cheapie produced independently by Jack Wrather and Robert Golden and released by Eagle-Lion Films.

The script is based on the book As We See Russia by members of the Overseas Press Club of America, but it also resembles the script for Hitler's Children (1943), a crude, earnest wartime propaganda piece written by the same screenwriter, Emmet Lavery. Lavery makes a similarly sensational case against the Soviet-backed Communist government in Hungary but not (entirely) out of tired reflexes. Rather, it's his main point: the Stalinists consciously use the personnel and techniques of their defeated arch-enemies, the Nazis.

As one character points out, Vilmos Olti, the president of the Budapest People's Court that tried Mindszenty, was a former Arrow Cross party man. (Olti consequently had to show a special ferocity in the case. This is the converse of the situation in Sophie Scholl, in which the head justice is a Communist seeking redemption with the Nazis.) And in Guilty of Treason the only Hungarians besides party members who support the Communists are former members of the Arrow Cross (who adapted to Stalinism presumably because any kind of totalitarianism gave scope to their taste for violent domination). Their signature is "Heil Hitler! Heil Stalin!"

Mindszenty is not at the center of Guilty of Treason, however. The fictional hero is Tom Kelly (Paul Kelly), a tough-talking journalist reporting on the descent of the Iron Curtain. In November 1948, Kelly, figuring Hungary will be the next hot spot, leaves Moscow for Budapest. (It didn't require clairvoyance to know something was up in Hungary: as Pope Pius XII is reputed to have said to Mindszenty (in one version) when he elevated him to Cardinal in 1946 along with 31 others (including Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York), "Among the 32 you will be the first to suffer the martyrdom whose symbol this red color is.")

Kelly is a hard-boiled newspaperman in the mode of a cynical Bogart tough guy, except that he starts out with the political engagement Bogart comes around to only at the end of Casablanca (1942) and To Have and Have Not (1944). He knows that the Soviets have come to Hungary to terrorize the opposition into submission, and he knows that they'll want to destroy Cardinal Mindszenty. And he says as much directly to Colonel Melnikov (Richard Derr), a true-believing Soviet officer cracking down on dissent in Budapest from 60 Andrássy. (Kelly, speaking in detective-fiction vernacular, goads Melnikov by saying he wants to see the "fix," the "frame-up" of the Cardinal.) Kelly then seeks Mindszenty out to hear what he has to say, and when his acquaintances start getting hurt and disappearing as a result, he wants to know what happened to them. As an investigative reporter Kelly thus also functions as a Bogart private eye.

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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