Gergely Dubóczky | Photo: Zsófia Raffay
Restored Romanticism The earliest film version of Mór Jókai’s novel, The Man with the Golden Touch, has been given incidental music. Man of Gold, Alexander Korda’s 1918 classic has had a chequered fate, with what seems like a happy end: this lavishly produced silent film was long thought lost, until it turned up in a German archive; thoroughly restored thanks to the intervention of the Hungarian National Film Archive, and, it is not even so silent now.
32
Let’s start with a term that didn’t exist when Alexander Korda was a young man (he was 25 when he directed the film): a big spoiler. When according to the plot Pasha Ali Tschorbadschi hears from the old Maxim Krisstyan that there is an arrest warrant for him, Ali promises a fortune to the old vagrant if he saves them. But then the pasha feels the stirrings a strange feeling: suspicion. We know this not only because of Gyula Szöreghy’s authentic portrayal of the pasha, but because it is written out: “suspicion”! Perhaps the young director was afraid the pasha’s beard would conceal his emotions, or that the audience, worn weary by the war (the film was shot during the last months of the fights), needed leading by the hand.
From the very first moment of the film to the last, Jókaiesque emotions whirl, clearly identifiable without intertitles. In the third act, there is an attack of mass swooning (Brazovics dies, Katschuka disappears); in the fourth the main protagonist Michael Timar’s inner voices start to speak, which must have been touching for contemporary viewers, and we are not left unmoved either. However turbulent the inner events may have been, they are dwarfed by the spectacular visuals: there is nothing in what is Korda’s only silent film in a presentable state (glue-on beards, the pasha’s palace, or other parts of the scenery) that would fall short of the works of the most chic directors of the time, even though big shots like Fritz Lang were already filming then.