Friday, June 7, 2013

A Tolonc (1914)

I was looking for some English-langauge information from Central Europe yesterday, what with the flooding going on not only in Germany, but in the Czech Republic and downstream along the Danube. That of course has little to do with classic cinema, until I came across this article from the Budapest Times:

Hungary to remaster early film by Casablanca director

A century-old silent film by the legendary Casablanca director Michael Curtiz is to be digitally remastered in Hungary, the National Digital Archive and Film Institute (MaNDA) announced on Tuesday after securing a state grant.

I have to admit that I'd never heard of the movie in question, called A Tolonc in the original Hungarian, and translated into English as either The Undesirable or The Exile. Of course, I knew that Michael Curtiz, before coming to the US and Anglicizing his name, had made films in his native Hungary under his original Hungarian name Mihály Kertész. Then again, the movie was presumed lost for decades, so it shouldn't be a surprise that almost nobody would know much about it.

There's not much to the rest of the relatively brief article, but it's still worth a read.

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