The following is an adapted version of an article written by Barnabás Leimeiszter, originally published in Magyar Krónika.
The photo below was taken by Éva Keleti in the Alabárdos restaurant in 1967, where for one evening parallel universes opened up, and western stars met eastern stars; only the scales were different. And I’m not suggesting that Orson Welles was physically huge by this time. Nor am I implying that Hungarian actors were any less talented than their Hollywood counterparts, who had become world stars. But when a Welles, who was not even an A-category celebrity in his home country anymore, entered the room, it immediately became clear how big, or rather how small stardom really was in Kádár-era Hungary.
After all, it was Irén Psota who was visibly smitten with Welles, not Welles with her. And Zoltán Latinovits went to stand next to Welles to bask in the glow of the American genius, not the other way round. This is an unfair comparison, of course, because even if it hadn’t been one of the greatest 20th-century artists in the middle but some short-term international sex symbol, our great actors would have still been reduced to grinning human scenery.
You’d think that the situation has improved after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and now we are in the same universe as these star giants. But I’m not sure we’ve figured out a proper way to stand beside them; so that there’s no arrogance, grotesque pomposity, but no bottom-up, loudly gesticulating adoration either.
At the Alabárdos restaurant that night, they were hardly philosophizing about such things. According to the weekly magazine Film Színház Muzsika (Film Theatre Music), Welles enjoyed the food served to the accompaniment of ‘fire-throwing magic tricks’ and did not forget to congratulate Latinovits, whom he saw that evening on the stage of the Thália theatre in the play The Schoolmistress by Sándor Bródy. He also stopped by the Vígszínház, where The Cat on the Hot Tin Roof was playing. ‘I had been to Budapest before the war, but that was a long time ago. It was the first time I saw the theatre here. And I can safely say that I have seen real theatre,’ Welles highlighted. The Hungarian artists also accompanied him to Hotel Gellért, entertaining one another with theatre stories, and Psota, at the end of the long evening, only said that the man was a ‘miracle’.
‘I had been to Budapest before the war, but that was a long time ago. It was the first time I saw the theatre here. And I can safely say that I have seen real theatre’
The previous year Welles had made his first colour film, a one-hour adaptation of Karen Blixen’s short story The Immortal Story. He came to Hungary to make a film of Blixen’s The Heroine, which he would have used to complement the first opus to ensure its cinematic presentation. They filmed for a day at the Opera House with György Bárdy and Virág Dőry, along with foreign actors. The director also told Hétfői Hírek (Monday News) that filming would last for two to three weeks, with visits to the Buda Castle, Kőszeg and other rural towns, and that Latinovits, Iván Darvas and Vera Venczel would also appear in the film.
It is known not from the Hungarian press but from the Welles monographs that these plans came to nothing. Welles left after a day’s shooting, dissatisfied with the Hungarian crew’s abilities, and the film company also charged him a terrible sum. The Belgian cameraman stated that after the director had been missing for two days, they broke down the door of his room at the Gellért, fearing they would find his body there. But there was no sign of Welles, who had already fled Hungary, leaving only unpaid bills behind.
There is another interesting side story. The Heroine‘s producer was Sándor Paál, who started out as a photojournalist and then worked in the Western film industry as Alexander Paal. He was the one who took Áron Tamási’s lover, actress Éva Szőke from Budapest, and launched her career on the international stage (although Eva Bartok never became a big star, Frank Sinatra is said to have fathered her child). Simultaneously with The Heroine, the swindler Paál was also working on a co-production of the film The Ghost of Lublón, based on a novella by Kálmán Mikszáth, directed by Márton Keleti, and written by Péter Kuczka. From Péter Gál Molnár’s recollections and agent’s reports we know that Paál was peddling the names of Sean Connery and Raquel Welch to the Hungarian film company, eventually bargaining to cast Welles as Chief of Police Novogradszky. The newspapers reported that Welles had already been preparing for the role, but the fake contracts and promises presented to convince the parties did not result in a film. So Orson Welles’s Hungarian adventure came to an early end—but a few years later, in his film essay F for Fake, he presented the work of world-famous Hungarian-born art forger Elmyr de Hory.
Related articles:
Click here to read the original article.
