The literary source was a play adapted from an operetta that had great success before WWI in Hungary, but also played in Vienna and in the USA. The film takes place in a village and on the front lines; the plot was well-known. A lovelorn young man leaves his parental home, his mother and beautiful sister.
He becomes a soldier, fights for years and in the meantime meets a fellow soldier who is his double and stays with him until the very last moment. This friend wants to bring the news about the protagonist’s death home, but the family mistakes him for their son, not knowing he is already dead. The film is a bold indictment of the war. At the beginning and the end, the angel of peace appears at the front to reconcile the soldiers fighting against each other. Surprisingly, it presents the war as if it had already ended.
The director was a disabled soldier and this was one of his first films. His male protagonists are also veterans; one of them served on the front lines in Italy and France. With few exceptions, the scenes were shot outdoors, not in a studio, which created a sensation at the time. There was nothing artificial about the actors as some of them stood before the cameras without any previous experience. This sometimes leads us to feel as if we were watching an early neorealist film.
The film survived in a 17.5 mm Pathé Rural print, making the film restoration very difficult in the late 1980’s, when technologies were considerably less advanced then today. The print we are presenting is therefore far from being perfect. This film marked the beginning of the restoration of silent films in the Hungarian National Film Archive and the print is far from perfect.

Márton Kurutz