“Italian manners, French costumes, German speech!” exclaims the hero of Sirius (Sziriusz, 1942), Dezsõ Ákos Hamza’s science fiction romance from the middle of WWII. He’s expressing national Hungarian pride mixed with disdain for all the foreign influences at court. The setting may be the 18th-century Austro-Hungarian Empire, but audiences would have understood an earful.
This not-so-subtle commentary on Hungary’s German and Italian allies, disguised within a lavish, escapist, costumed romantic fantasy, is only one of the surprising things about Sirius. Another is that such a thing exists at all. After decades of languishment, the film was glitteringly restored in 2024 by Hungary’s National Film Institute and released on Blu-ray by Deaf Crocodile.
Perhaps the main surprise is that Hungarian cinema made a big-budget science fiction film in 1942. To partly explain this, Sirius was based on a 1894 novel by a very popular national writer, Ferenc Herczeg, so the property wasn’t unknown in the country.
Hamza had wanted to film it for some time, and he was riding high in the early ’40s with a series of popular films. He would soon use his power to make a film that questioned the nation’s Axis-imposed anti-Semitic laws, Half a Boy (Egy flunak a fele, 1944), but that got banned until after the War, so he couldn’t win them all.
It might help to know what most modern ignorami don’t. We tend to think of the Axis Powers in WWII as Germany, Italy, and Japan. It’s commonly forgotten that Hungary’s ties to Germany and Italy made it also an Axis country, and that it tried to extricate itself from this situation by negotiating a peace with Britain and the US. This triggered Hitler’s anger to the point that Germany formally took over the country by 1944, when everything really hit the fan, but hold that thought.
When Hamza made Sirius a lavish science fiction epic, Hungary was fully in the War on the Axis side, a point never even faintly hinted at in the movie. As with much escapist cinema in Axis countries, you’d never imagine a war was going on somewhere. It opens in a carefree world of decadent aristocrats at costume balls, and that’s where the callow young hero, Tibor Akos (Lászlo Szilassy), is introduced, with his reputation for drinking, gambling, and womanizing.
When the ball is over and he’s pocketed a stray lady’s glove in a quasi-Cinderella moment, he gets roped into visiting the eccentric Professor Sergius (Elemér Baló), who announces he’s built a time machine. He explains the theory: the thing can travel so fast around the dateline that it naturally travels into the past, like Superman flying supersonically around the planet from west to east. Well, that’s simple enough. Before you can say “H.G. Wells,” Sergius has dropped Tibor off in 1748 Venice.
Fortunately, he’s dressed in an 18th-century hussar’s uniform from the costume ball, and now he trades one pretentious, overstuffed, aristocratic ball for another given by his own great-grandfather (Rajczy Lajos), who turns out to be a hot-headed gambler and lothario ready for duels. Hmm, meet the old Count, same as the new Count. Tibor promptly falls in love with a striking and statuesque opera singer, Rosina Beppo (Katalin Karády), pure of heart, square of jaw, and fierce of eyebrow.
Watching Karády’s sensual yet dignified performance in Sirius takes on powerful resonance when the modern viewer knows she was not only the most sensational Garbo-esque diva of Hungarian cinema, but that she would be arrested and tortured by the Nazis for her defiant behavior, which included bribing firing squads not to execute Jewish prisoners and hiding them in her house. Like almost everyone else involved in the film, she ended up emigrating to South America after the War, although she spent her last 20 years running a hat shop in New York. As they say, you can’t make this stuff up.
Author Stephen Bissette’s commentary discusses the history of time travel in science fiction and film, and offers historical background on Hungary and Sirius. Some of the same contextual material is covered in a video essay by film producer Will Dodson and an interview with György Ráduly, who supervised the restoration. This is a film in which such material helps, for the dialogue tosses off many references to historical people and events that would have been known to Hungarian audiences of 1942, not so much now.
The extended jockeying and one-upmanship of the 1748 ball in honor of Empress Maria Theresa, the hobnobbing with famous poets totally unknown to non-Hungarians, and even the bizarre presence of a famous castrato superstar, Cafarelli (Pethes Sándor, with singing voice dubbed by a soprano), can be confusing to the modern viewer, who really only cares about the budding romance between Tibor and Rosina. Nevertheless, the operatic and ballet performances, as well as the ball dances, feel convincingly lavish and in period, and they’re ravishingly staged.
The wrap-up of Sirius has a few twists in store. The packaging makes the comparison with Jeannot Szwarc’s Somewhere in Time (1980) and Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future (1985), and Walter Chaw’s liner notes make a comparison with another 1942 romance directed by a Hungarian, Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca.
I also appreciate Chaw’s observation that the musical staging of the mythic incident that led to the Trojan War is a subtle comment on the vanities of war. Rolf Giesen’s notes compare Sirius with yet another contemporary fantasy directed by a Hungarian, Josef von Baky’s German production of Munchhausen (1943), which was being filmed as Sirius emerged in theatres.
All this thematic cross-pollination is valid, though mostly coincidental, for Sirius is ultimately very much its own thing. Rudolf Icsey’s black and white photography is gorgeously restored, showcasing the subtle differences between the dreamy shine of the past and the crisp look of the present. Tibor Polgár’s score also contributes to the dream conjured by Peter Rákóczy’s screenplay.
As long as archives keep surprising us with revelations such as those found on Deaf Crocodile’s Blu-ray, the long, strange trip of film history will keep us rewriting what we think we know.