DVD Reviews: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, The Prisoner, Guilty of Treason - Page 9

In other words, while the movie is devoted to Mindszenty's cause, it's shaped by the low instinct that his cause needs to be popularized. So it focuses on Kelly, and on Stephanie (Bonita Granville), a music teacher who loves Melnikov just a bit less than she loves Hungarian liberty. This leads to some loony mixtures of romance and politics, the choicest being when the Politburo's man in Budapest, Commissar Belov (Roland Winters), walks into Melnikov's office and finds Stephanie in his arms, during a brief pause in her attempt to get him to start an anti-Communist underground with her. Without hesitating Melnikov turns her in. This perfidy is hard to respond to because the betrayal of a lover can't make Communist police-state tactics any worse than they are in themselves. Such a climax is camp, the cliffhanger on a Radio Free America daytime soap opera.

Stephanie is similar to Granville's role in Hitler's Children and Derr, a jaw-clencher, plays Melnikov in the same robotic manner as Tim Holt plays the Hitler Jugend opposite her (and, even more amusingly, as the 13-year-old Skip Homeier plays the devious grade-school fascist in Tomorrow, the World! (1944)). The point of having an ideologically committed character like Melnikov say nothing outside the scope of his ideological commitment (he tends not to use contractions, either) is to emphasize how the ideology dehumanizes its adherents. Instead it exposes the writer's, and generally the actors', inadequacy. (What any actor could do with dialogue like this I don't know: Melnikov: "I'm sure if he saw you, Stalin himself would insist upon kissing the bride." Stephanie: "Darling, you're wonderful!")

Guilty of Treason is a B-movie, budget and soul, and yet its political judgments are grounded in an accurate journalistic evaluation of a deplorable reality. At the core of its inauthentic recreation of Budapest in turmoil is an awareness of the plain sordidness of the events, conveyed with the most brutal force in the scenes of Stephanie's torture, which are the least ennobling — and least eroticized — ever filmed in Hollywood. They more than make up for the dopey love story that leads up to them.

In addition, as Mindszenty Charles Bickford (who looks exactly like what the Cardinal was - a man of the earth and of the people who worked it) is given dialogue adapted from the Cardinal's writings and speeches, which lends the actor an unusual amount of dignity. Bickford isn't wise in a folksy, Hollywood manner because the Cardinal's words are not ecumenical. They're too specific for generalized man-for-all-seasons reverence, and the issue was too hot and glamorless. (One advantage of treating it as a contemporary news story rather than an historical pageant, like the martyrdom of Thomas More, for instance, which allows for courtly pomp and finery.) During his interrogations, Bickford stands tall in the blinding spotlight and gives his gravelly voice to direct statement of the Cardinal's positions.

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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