Old Yorker

István Szabó (1981)

The best-known work in the Hungarian filmmaker István Szabó’s long cinema career, Mephisto comprises three main elements.  First, the Faust legend.  Second, a matter of historical fact:  that various artists and intellectuals in 1930s Germany accommodated themselves to the Nazi regime.  Third, the idea that actors, as a breed, are motivated chiefly by a desire for limelight and admiration – as human beings, are empty vessels, filled only by the characters they pretend to be.  The first two themes have great intrinsic interest, and the third has a preposterous appeal.  All three have either proven dramatic power or dramatic potential.  As combined by Szabó, though, they make for an obvious and monotonous film.

The actor protagonist is Hendrik Höfgen (Klaus Maria Brandauer), whose story begins in the 1920s.  He’s first seen in a dressing room at a Hamburg theatre.  The loud applause greeting another performer on the theatre stage – a visiting operetta star (Ildikó Kishonti), based in Berlin – causes Höfgen great, even physical distress.  He crouches on the dressing-room floor, almost literally tearing his hair out.  It’s an immediate, emphatic indication of his egocentric hunger; nothing that follows contradicts or qualifies this first impression, as Höfgen, who graduates from Hamburg to Berlin circa 1930, ascends the greasy pole.  In Berlin, he and his friend, Otto Ulrichs (Péter Andorai), found a communist ‘people’s theatre’, but you know that Höfgen, unlike Ulrichs, isn’t impelled by political or artistic beliefs.  It’s just another step towards his self-proclaimed destiny of becoming German’s most famous actor.  Because it’s clear that Höfgen will stop at nothing to achieve his ambition, his subsequent capitulation to the Third Reich has no tragic impact.

Shortly before the Nazis take power, Höfgen plays for the first time what will become his trademark role, Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust.  This was also the most celebrated role of the German stage and screen actor Gustaf Gründgens (1899-1963), the inspiration for the title character in the novel Mephisto, by Thomas Mann’s son Klaus, on which Szabó and his co-writer Péter Dobai based their screenplay.  (Gründgens’ film parts included the bowler-hatted underworld boss, presiding over the kangaroo court trying Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s M  (1931).)  Briefly married to Klaus Mann’s sister Erika, Gründgens may also have been Klaus’s lover; what’s certain is that he became one of the Nazi regime’s favourite performers.  Klaus Mann left Germany in 1933 (he became a US citizen ten years later) and a striking feature of the novel Mephisto is that it was published as early in 1936 – in Amsterdam:  the book was banned in West Germany until the year of release of Szabó’s film.

Made so long after the events it describes, the screen Mephisto can’t, of course, replicate the book’s immediacy in relation to them.  Instead, Szabó attempts to allegorise the story – but he does so half-heartedly, to put it mildly.  Although the name of Hitler is never spoken, this seems a token gesture, given the sea of Nazi armbands in evidence, and with characters announcing that ‘the Nazis have won the election’, ‘the Reichstag was burned down’, and so on.  The same goes for the anonymising of the senior Nazi (Rolf Hoppe) who takes a shine to Höfgen:  this Göring-like figure, referred to only as ‘the General’ or ‘the Prime Minister’, enables the actor’s rise to the theatrical heights of which he has always dreamed.

As expected, Höfgen uses others to reach his destination.  He marries twice, both times for advantage.  His first wife, Barbara Bruckner (Krystyna Janda), belongs to a wealthy, cultured, liberal (Mann-ish?) family that opposes the Nazi regime.  After their divorce and Barbara’s departure for France, Höfgen marries Nicoletta von Niebuhr (Ildikó Bánsági), similarly wealthy but more politically acceptable to Höfgen’s new masters.  He does try to exploit his connections with the General for the sake of close friends, including Juliette Martens (Karin Boyd), Höfgen’s mixed-race dance tutor and lover in Hamburg, who continues to be his mistress in Berlin until she’s eventually deported.  Juliette may or may not be luckier than Höfgen’s old comrade Ulrichs, whom the Nazis shoot and kill.  Höfgen, in the meantime, revels in his ever-increasing celebrity and the esteem in which he’s held by the regime.  He eventually takes over as director of the German national theatre and gets the opportunity to seal his acting greatness by playing Hamlet.

Next to nothing is seen of Höfgen’s Hamlet, which is disappointing and symptomatic of Szabó’s larger approach.  It might not have been enough to transform the film, but Mephisto could be a good deal more compelling if Szabó’s interest in Höfgen the actor went deeper.  An early scene in Hamburg, when he calls on Juliette, is promising.  As the pair dance sensuously together, Klaus Maria Brandauer’s movement is mesmerising.  (As well as conveying his character’s delight in proving himself an apt pupil, he seems to hint at Höfgen’s excited anticipation of the startling sex with Juliette that will follow.)  When they move from barre to bed, though, Juliette tells Höfgen, humorously but meaning it, that he ‘can’t even drink a beer like a man who feels like drinking one … ”A beer, please” sounds phony when you say it’.  Höfgen’s excuse that he doesn’t drink is almost beside the point.  Juliette’s remark plants the idea that this man is so thoroughly an actor that pretending is his usual way of being.

This tantalising opener isn’t followed up either in the lead performance or in the film’s exploration of Höfgen’s acting.  That’s not to disparage Brandauer, whose charisma and dynamism dominate Mephisto, yet those qualities are a problem, too.  He’s so expert and accomplished in all he does that it’s never easy to believe in the Hamburg Höfgen, either as a thwarted provincial actor or as an anxiously workaholic actor-manager:  it can only be a matter of (screen) time before he becomes a star.  Not only is Höfgen pretending on stage and off, but Brandauer is also charismatic in both spheres.  As a result, there’s no sense of Höfgen’s being transformed when he performs.  This is true even when he’s playing Mephisto – or, at least, the transformation is only cosmetic, through the character’s white face mask and dark eye make-up.

The film’s portrayal of Höfgen the performer becomes so shallow that, after the General remarks on his weak handshake, Szabó shows the actor practising in private how to improve things.  This is silly:  it’s not a matter of physical strength – any instinctive actor/pretender worth his salt would just make a mental note to shake hands firmly in future and see that he did so.  (This moment raised a laugh in the NFT3 audience.  It should have been a derisive laugh, though I suspect it wasn’t.)  Mephisto’s closing stages don’t make much sense either.  After presenting the protagonist as a sly, unprincipled egotist for more than two hours, Szabó changes tack.  Höfgen suddenly seems slow on the uptake, surprised, when he asks one personal favour too many, that the General bawls him out.  This is designed to prepare the ground for the film’s climax, as Höfgen, at the General’s side, looks out over a vast arena:

‘Well, Mephisto, what power is looking down on you here.  Do you feel it?  This is theatre!   Look at this arena.  It’s almost ready.  Wonderful, isn’t it?  This is where I’d stage a performance.  Don’t blink, Hendrik, look history in the eye.  … We shall rule Europe and the world.  A thousand-year empire …’

The General orders Höfgen into the middle of the arena, where he stands alone, a tiny figure stranded in, dazzled and tormented by, huge, intersecting spotlights.  He sees – but too late! – what was blindingly obvious to anyone watching the film from the moment the General first appeared:  that Höfgen, the great interpreter of diabolical temptation, has all along been playing Faust to the General’s Mephistopheles.  (Rolf Hoppe is far from the only cast member doing that familiar Nazi officer screen routine, mirthless smile and suave manner veneering brutal purpose.)   The visual bombast of this last scene is necessary, of course:  Szabó couldn’t have delivered any other kind of big finish, having spelt out Mephisto’s message so clearly throughout (until his eleventh-hour adjustment to Höfgen’s understanding of what he’s doing).  Höfgen’s closing lines – ‘What do they want of me?  After all, I’m only an actor’ – put the seal on the film’s obviousness.

Although Szabó’s narrative moves forward as briskly as Höfgen’s career, Mephisto, at 144 minutes, is too long.  This screening, in BFI’s ‘Restored’ slot, unexpectedly went on even longer.  A BFI person asked us to welcome to the stage a representative (I didn’t catch either of their names) of the Hungarian National Film Institute’s Film Archive, which oversaw the 4K restoration.  The BFI woman stressed that the Hungarian man wouldn’t be giving an introduction, ‘just saying a few words’.  That was never going to happen.  As her guest confirmed, Mephisto is a film of great significance to Hungary, and István Szabó, now eighty-seven years old, is a similarly important figure in national culture.  In 1982, Mephisto became the first Hungarian film ever to win (what was then) the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar; it remained the country’s only recipient of the award until 2016, when László Nemes’ Son of Saul won.  So the Hungarian visitor’s few words kept multiplying, and he can’t be blamed.

I know this grumble seems petty, but I can’t be the only member of the BFI audience who’s a clock-watcher because he’s also hoping to be a train-catcher, and who finds lack of advance notice about a screening’s increased running time vexing.  I realise, too, that I’m having it both ways in complaining that the BFI bod didn’t bother to mention that this restored version of Mephisto, originally a German-language film, had the actors’ voices dubbed into Hungarian, with English subtitles.  (Szabó’s cast included a mixture of German- and Hungarian-speaking actors, but Klaus Maria Brandauer is Austrian and Rolf Hoppe, in the largest supporting role, was German.)  This made for a distracting mismatch between the mouths seen moving and the words being heard.

26 November 2025