“1945” My rating: B
91 minutes | No MPAA rating
The two men who get off the train outside a rural Hungarian town hardly seem threatening.
The older fellow has the white beard and black hat and coat of a pious Jew. His younger companion (his son?) is also clad in black.
With the help of a porter they unload two crates — they look like small caskets — off the baggage car and onto a horse-drawn cart for the silent hour-long walk to town.
Nothing particularly threatening or suspicious about the pair, yet their presence sets off moral convulsions throughout the community.
Nobody is more wary than the town clerk, Istvan (Peter Rudolf), a mover and shaker preparing for the wedding that day of his not-particularly-impressive only son to a local peasant girl. His joy over the festivities is short-lived.
What gives?
Peter Rudolph
It’s the past coming back to haunt the present. Ferenc Torok’s terse drama unfolds in a town where, several years before, the good citizens heartily participated in the arrest and deportation of their Jewish neighbors. Istvan made a point of seizing most of the property these unfortunates left behind, and he secured his political and economic position by handing out gifts of Jewish property to various citizens.
He’s been fat and prosperous ever since…and he’s now rattled lest some survivor of Hitler’s final solution try to take back his birthright.
“1945” plays almost like a documentary, shot in crisp black-and-white and unfolding in what appears to be real time. It’s not a film of big dramatic moments, but rather of slowly percolating tensions.
In its setup and slow narrative unspooling it is reminiscent of films like “High Noon” and “Bad Day at Black Rock.” Those American titles were, of course, westerns (one 19th century, one set shortly after WW2), and built toward the traditional violent confrontation that is an essential part of the genre.
But Torok’s film isn’t about avenging an injustice. It’s about living with the guilt of that injustice…and that emphasis makes for a quietly haunting moviegoing experience.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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