At the 54th Academy Awards, in 1982, Chariots of Fire was imperial, and Katharine Hepburn broke records. Less remembered today is a darkly brilliant European film about a stage actor in Nazi Germany that went home from the ceremony with the best international feature prize. Mephisto, directed by István Szabó, was the first ever Hungarian film to do so.
“The moment took me by surprise,” remembers Szabó, 87, four decades later. “I didn’t expect it.” Visibly elated on the live broadcast as he took to the stage, Szabó today says that he “knew this award wasn’t just mine, but also Brandauer’s”, meaning the film’s electrifying lead actor, and the largely Hungarian crew “who contributed with their talent to the making of the film”.
Though 1981’s Mephisto was a landmark film in Hungarian cinema, it has largely disappeared. A DVD run in the early 2000s fell out of print, and the film has generally been overlooked by the major streaming platforms. This December, Second Run – in collaboration with the National Film Institute Hungary – have restored and rereleased Szabó’s masterpiece, along with its follow-ups Colonel Redl, an epic about a gay officer in the Austro-Hungarian empire, and Hanussen, a Nazi-era occult drama also featuring Klaus Maria Brandauer.
Mephisto tells the story of Hendrik Höfgen. An ambitious stage actor as the Nazis come to power in Germany, Höfgen cuts himself off from his roots in the leftist theatre scene to ingratiate himself with the fascist regime. “Höfgen is a very talented actor who wants to assert his talent at all costs,” says Szabó. “To stand in the middle of the stage, in the spotlight.” Friends and colleagues are arrested, killed, exiled. But Höfgen only digs in deeper with the Nazis, who make him head of the Berlin state theatre.
All of this is told through the extraordinary central performance of Brandauer, the Austrian actor (later director) depicting all of Höfgen’s frustrated ambition, wilful ignorance and fatal capacity for seduction in a performance as vivid and shocking as any in cinema history. Today, Szabó pays tribute to the “particularly talented actor” with whom he collaborated most recently in 2020’s Final Report. “It was crucial for me, for us, to decide what to show in close up from Brandauer’s secrets. What he reveals and what he conceals.”
Mephisto is based on the real life story of Gustaf Gründgens, whose career soared when the Nazis ploughed subsidies into the stage to shape it in their own image. In 1936, Gründgens’ former lover Klaus Mann wrote a scathing, thinly veiled novel about the actor, later subject to a landmark 1960s libel case that resulted in the book being banned (on paper, the ban still applies today, though the book is widely published). Gründgens died in 1963 having never publicly expressed remorse for his Nazi affiliations. But in Szabó’s hands, Mephisto becomes a universal work of art: specific and cliche-free about the politics of 1930s Germany, but also a wider Faustian fable about man’s opportunistic complicity with evil.
With authoritarianism on the rise across the globe, does Mephisto hold lessons for the 21st century? “The desire for self-assertion is a human trait that can create many positive values,” says the director. “The problem arises when it is used for the sake of a wrong ideology or policy, and a talented person allows themselves to be exploited, or even fights in support of those in power. This still exists in the 21st century, and it does not necessarily require a dictatorship. The power of business is enough. Or some other motive.” Szabó rebuffs a question about 2026’s Hungarian parliamentary elections, thought to be the tightest for Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party in his 15 year tenure (“of course I’m interested, like everybody else”).
This year has seen an increased focus on Hungarian art, with László Krasznahorkai being awarded this year’s Nobel prize in Literature and a Booker win for Hungarian-British novelist David Szalay. Szabó says that he considers himself a Hungarian director, “but it is important to emphasise central European existence in this context. History marches relentlessly through central Europe.” In Szabó’s work, this has meant depicting the close of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Holocaust (Szabó has explored his wartime Jewish upbringing in Budapest in films such as Sunshine and early work Father) and Hungary’s communist dictatorship (in 2006, he admitted having informed to the secret police, which he said was part of an effort to save the life of a classmate).
Szabó is as pessimistic about cinema as directors in their 80s tend to be, but praises Barnabás Tóth’s 2019 film Those Who Remained, a lyrical film about life after the Holocaust, and Bálint Szimler’s controversial Fekete Pont (Lesson Learned), a broadside against Hungary’s state education system. So far, the only other Hungarian film to match Mephisto’s Oscar winning achievement is 2015’s Son of Saul.
Is Szabó’s own future in cinema any more certain? “I can’t say whether I’ll have a chance to make another film,” says the director, who cites the “quite serious physical work” of directing as his main obstacle. “You have to go up to a lot of people to talk to them, because you can’t shout over other people’s heads.”
• Mephisto, Colonel Redl and Hanussen are released as a Blu-ray limited edition box set
