Akit ketten szeretnek (1919) review: Michael Curtiz’s forgotten erotic surgical noir

Michael Curtiz before he conquered Hollywood

A century ago, before Casablanca or Robin Hood ever flickered across American dream palaces, a 23-year-old Hungarian named Mihaly Kertész aimed his lens at a story so lacerating that censors in three countries excised whole reels. The surviving fragments—scarcely 52 minutes—feel like a scalpel scraped across celluloid: Akit ketten szeretnek (literally, "The One Whom Two Love") is part surgical thriller, part morphine-addled confession, and entirely allergic to moral comfort.

Set in a 1919 Budapest where the streets still glisten with revolutionary rain, the plot coils around Klára (Matild Gyõry), a cabaret chanteuse whose heart bears the literal stitches of two men. Dr. Ákos Török (Péter Andorffy) is the empire’s golden boy, a showman in a starched coat who operates under chandeliers while a string quartet plays Strauss. Opposite him, Dr. Géza Varga (László Csiky) haunts the charity wards, a brooding genius who grafts skin onto syphilitic soldiers and scribbles love poems on X-ray plates. Each believes Klára belongs to him; Klára, draped in pearls and laudanum, believes she belongs to the song. The film’s central conceit—that a woman might be loved so fiercely she becomes a battlefield—never slides into melodrama because Curtiz refuses to take sides. His camera circles, predatory, capturing every tremor of desire like a medical time-lapse of rot.

Curtiz’s visual grammar here predates German Expressionism yet already sips from the same poisoned chalice. Interiors pulse with tungsten oranges and nickel blues; exteriors smear into charcoal smudges. In one bravura sequence, a tracking shot follows Klára’s blood drip as it travels along a mosaic floor, slides down a gutter, and finally pools beneath a poster announcing Török’s next public anatomy lecture. The city itself becomes vascular—every alley an artery, every tram bell a heartbeat. Compare this arterial cartography to the nocturnal geometry Curtiz later brought to The Monster and the Girl and you’ll glimpse a career-long obsession: how passion, once pathologized, leaks into civic space.

The performances vibrate at a frequency modern viewers rarely encounter. Gyõry, barely twenty during shooting, ages a decade across the story without a single trick of make-up; she simply lowers her voice half an octave and lets exhaustion calcify beneath her cheekbones. Andorffy’s Török preens, but watch the way his pupils dilate whenever a nurse uncorks ether—he’s addicted to control, not chemicals. Csiky, meanwhile, underplays so radically he seems to be listening to music we can’t hear; when he finally confesses his crimes to a priest who is also his patient, the whisper is so hushed you lean into the silence and nearly topple.

Artúr Földes’s screenplay, adapted from a scandalous stage play banned after three performances, weaponizes ambiguity. Is Klára ill, or does she merely crave the velvet captivity of sanatoriums where every need is a bell-ring away? Are the surgeons rivals or secret blood brothers, bound by the Hippocratic oath they both profane? The script never answers; instead it stages moral Grand Guignol inside Budapest’s newly built Rooftop Hygiene Pavilion, where society dames watch tonsillectomies through opera glasses. Földes deletes the play’s explanatory monologues and inserts lacunae: jump cuts, missing hours, a wedding ring discovered in a dissected lung. Viewers become accomplices, forced to stitch causality from scraps the way the doctors graft skin.

Cinematographer Iván Bánkúri, later executed by fascists for filming anti-regime footage, shoots faces like topography. Foreheads become cliff sides, clavicles coastal ridges. When Klára lies on the examination table, the camera hovers directly above, transforming her torso into a continent at civil war. Restoration experts at the Hungarian National Film Archive recovered this footage from a stash of 35 mm reels mislabeled Sentenced for Life; digital cleanup removed mold blooms while leaving in the gate weave, so every frame subtly breathes. The resulting 4K DCP, screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato, pulses like fresh bruise.

Composer-attribution remains murky, but the surviving score—reconstructed from handwritten parts found inside a piano bench—mixes Viennese waltz with Romany violin, producing a woozy cosmopolitan swirl. During the climactic operation, strings descend into col legno chatter while a solo trumpet quotes Debussy’s "Syrinx", suggesting the surgeons are half scientists, half pan-pipe seducers. The new Blu-ray offers both this reconstructed track and a fearless electro-accompaniment by Szünetmentes Május, whose glitch-hop heartbeat underlines the film’s modernity.

Specialists often compare Curtiz’s early Hungarian work to Hamlet adaptations of the same year, arguing both probe masculine indecision. Yet where Shakespeare’s prince intellectualizes paralysis, Curtiz’s doctors weaponize it. Their hesitation does not delay revenge; it performs surgery on the beloved while she is still awake. In that sense, Akit ketten szeretnek anticipates the body-horror noir of The Wolf and the moral vertigo of Saints and Sorrows, but arrives there first, drunk on expressionist shadows and post-imperial ennui.

The supplements on Arbelos’s Blu-ray (region-free, 1080p) are exemplary. Historian Dr. Veronika Kincses provides a 42-minute visual essay mapping Budapest’s 1919 medical district, proving every hallway in the film still exists behind modern façades. A 20-page booklet folds out into a miniature film poster; essayist John Powers argues that Curtiz’s obsession with triangles—romantic, architectural, moral—starts here and snakes all the way to Mildred Pierce. Most revelatory: an alternate French ending, discovered in a Parisian church basement, where Klára survives but loses the ability to sing, condemning her lovers to silence more absolute than death. Watching both finis in succession feels like witnessing your own autopsy from opposite sides of the slab.

Contemporary resonance? Consider how the #MeToo era reframes the surgeons’ god-complex. Their instruments penetrate while their eyes seek gratitude; their power is pharmacological, not merely physical. Klára’s eventual revolt—she pockets a scalpel, not to kill but to scar herself—reads like an early manifesto of bodily autonomy. The scene lasts nine seconds but sears the retina: a woman reclaiming her geography by vandalizing the map.

Yet the film also indicts the audience. Curtiz repeatedly frames spectators—nurses, interns, us—peering through door cracks or round glasses, hungry for gore. The operating theater becomes cabaret, the cabaret becomes operating theater; voyeurism is the only constant. In 1919 Hungary, still stitching itself together after the Aster Revolution, such self-interrogation was radical. A century later, in an age of televised surgeries and true-crime podcasts, it feels prophetic.

Some viewers complain the surviving print is too fragmentary; entire subplots—Klára’s morphine supplier, the police photographer’s blackmail scheme—exist only as photographic stills. I disagree. These lacunae turn us into forensic pathologists, reconstructing narrative from splinters the way the doctors reconstruct faces from shrapnel. Gaps are not flaws; they are invitations.

Criterion, Kino, Arrow: take note. Arbelos has set the gold standard for silent-era restoration with this release. Their booklet even reproduces the original morphine-prescription pad used as a prop—watermarked, numbered, and liable to inspire cosplay among the darkly inclined.

Bottom line: Akit ketten szeretnek is not a museum piece; it is open-heart surgery without anesthetic. It proves Curtiz arrived in Hollywood already armed with a mastery of shadow, pace, and erotic dread. Watch it once for historical bragging rights, then again for the sheer visceral jolt. The film ends on a title card: "Love, like suture, must eventually be removed." Don’t believe it. This one festers under the skin forever.

Technical specs: 1.33:1 aspect ratio; 4K restoration from 35 mm nitrate; DTS-HD 2.0 stereo (reconstructed score); original Hungarian intertitles with English, French, Spanish subtitles; region-free.

Recommended companion viewings: The Price of Crime for shared medical noir dread; Obryv for another tale of love dissected by revolution.