Summary
Somewhere between the Carpathians and the puszta, where soil smells of bloodied bronze and autumnal thunder, a nation’s soul is forged in celluloid; Curtiz and Dános, still apprentices to light, let the Danube itself narrate a saga of landed gentry whose wheatfields ripple like lion pelts under imperial edicts. Count Géza—Alfréd Deésy’s angular silhouette—returns from Viennese salons to find his ancestral acres mortgaged to a cabal of faceless creditors; the deed of trust, inked by moonlight and sealed with a woman’s betraying kiss, lies folded in the bodice of the Count’s former beloved, Erzsébet, played by Lucy Doraine as a porcelain libertine whose glance could scald marble. Across the horizon trudges Gusztáv Vándory’s Pál, a horse-whisperer turned reluctant rebel, muscles taut as violin strings, bearing witness as new-fangled iron ploughs tear sacred turf while trains scream through once-silent horizons—progress wearing the mask of catastrophe. Károly Lajthay’s land agent, a velvet-gloved opportunist, stages torch-lit auctions beneath ruined castle walls, selling hectares for zlotys, for francs, for promises whispered in Yiddish and Slovak and German, until the very act of surveying becomes a sacrilege. Rózsi Szirmay’s Veronka, a servant girl with pupils like flooded basements, smuggles letters stitched inside geese carcasses, carrying hope from manor to starving hamlet, her footsteps drumming a clandestine national anthem. Curtiz’s camera, drunk on pagan chiaroscuro, lingers on hands plunged into loam: fingers blackened, nails cracked, yet caressing clods as if they were pages of scripture. Lovemaking happens in haylofts under watchful icons; betrayal happens in parliament corridors under gas-jets; redemption, if any, comes only when a ploughshare is beaten into a sabre and the wheat itself, golden as Byzantine mosaic, is set ablaze to delay the advancing Ruthene mercenaries. The film ends not with victory but with a single furrow left uncut—an open wound—while the Count, stripped of title and coat, walks eastward into sunrise, cradling a fistful of native dust that trickles through his knuckles like an hourglass counting down to the next uprising.
