Mephisto ***** (1981, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Krystyna Janda, Ildikó Bánsági) – Classic Movie Review 9348

Director István Szabó’s 1981 Mephisto stars Klaus Maria Brandauer, who gives a tour-de-force performance in this 1981 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-winner about a leftist 1920s German theatre actor, Hendrik Hoefgren (famous for his playing of Mephistopheles), selling out to the Nazis.

Mephisto is a dazzling study in ambition, greed and corruption, with a screenplay by Péter Dobai and István Szabó based on the novel by Klaus Mann (son of the German writer Thomas Mann), using details of the real life story of his actor uncle Gustaf Gründgens (1899–1963).

Director Szabó does a wonderful job of moving and informing the viewer.

István Szabó won both the Best Screenplay award and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981. It was London Critics Circle Film Awards choice as Foreign Language Film of the Year.

Sequels: Colonel Redl (1985), Hanussen.

Also in the cast are Ildikó Bánsági, Krystyna Janda, Rolfe Hoppe, Karin Boyd, György Cserhalmi, Péter Andorai, Christine Harbort, Tamás Major, Ildikó Kishonti, Mária Bisztrai, Sándor Lukács, Ágnes Bánfalvy, Judit Hernádi, Vilmos Kun, Martin Hellberg, Jozsef Csor and English film critic David Robinson (as the critic Davidson).

Mephisto gets a new 4K restoration in 2020.

Gründgens’s most famous role was Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust in 1956-57. He was portrayed in the book Mephisto, written by Klaus Mann (brother of Erika Mann, Gründgens’s first wife, 1926-29). Gründgens stopped further publications of the book, but it was republished in 1981.

Gründgens’s career continued undisturbed during the Nazi regime because he starred in some propaganda movies and was the favorite actor of Hermann Göring. He was imprisoned by the Soviets in 1945, but released after a nine-month internment thanks to the intercession by the Communist, anti-fascist actor Ernst Busch, whom Gründgens had saved from execution by the Nazis in 1943.

He played Schränker in Fritz Lang’s M (1931). His last film was as Mephistopheles in Faust (1960).

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9348

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