Egy dollár / [One Dollar]

Uwe Jens Krafft: Egy dollár / [One Dollar], 1923: Ila Lóth. Photo from IMDb.

EGY DOLLÁR / PER UN DOLLARO / [ONE DOLLAR] (Corvin, HU 1923)
    Dir: Uwe Jens Krafft; sc: B. E. Lüthge, based on the short story “Az egyhuszsos leány” [The Twenty-Dollar Girl] (1894–1898), by Mór Jókai; ph: István Eiben, Alfred Hansen; set des: Ludwig Reibert; cast: Ila Lóth (Maggie), Lajos Réthey (Bagger, huckster & loan shark), Gábor Rajnay (Charley Brown, Ilona Mattyasovszky (la madre di Charley / Charley’s mother) Zoltán Szerémy (Mr. Walker, the butler), Ferenc Vendrey (Giovanni, the old servant), Pál Lukács (Norris, sailor), Ödön Bárdi, Alice Erd?s, Irma F. Lányi, Teréz Kürti, Lajos Székely, Marilyn Gyarmathy; 35 mm, 1784 m, 89’ (18 fps), tinted, Hungarian National Film Archive.
    Italian intertitles.
    Grand piano: Günter Buchwald.
    30 min from the beginning viewed at Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM): Fuori quadro, 9 Oct 2004

Gyongyi Balogh (GCM): "Synopsis: Mrs. Morton sells all her valuables to raise money to travel to see her dying uncle in America, but she still needs one dollar. The only way to raise it is to pawn her little daughter Maggie at Bagger’s, the pawnbroker’s and loan shark’s. Raised in Bagger’s establishment, Maggie grows into a beautiful young woman, and in time two sailors from the ship Liberia, Charley and Norris, compete for her charms. As a last spree in his life, the old pawnbroker joins in the competition. But Maggie will only give herself to the one she truly loves."

"Mór Jókai (1825–1904), a giant of Hungarian literature, known as the Hungarian Victor Hugo for his many romantic novels, was among the first to welcome moving pictures when he saw them for the first time in Nice in 1895. At the time he could never have dreamed this new invention would one day become an art form, nor could he have suspected his own novels would be brought to life on the screen. Adapting them would be a serious challenge for Hungarian filmmakers, one they regarded with trepidation. Their excessive reverence for Jókai’s work may account for the fact that the first Jókai film was a German-Hungarian co-production filmed at a German studio by a German director (Die armen Reichen, 1915, directed and scripted by Walter Schmidthässler, based on Jókai’s Szegeny gazdagok / Poor Plutocrats), and that the majority of subsequent Jókai screen adaptations were made by German directors working in Hungary."

"Egy dollár (One Dollar) is the work of German director Uwe Jens Krafft, who did not display the same respect as his colleagues for Jókai’s short story, a popular Hungarian classic. Krafft regarded Jókai’s work as raw material only, using the short story's basic plot of the girl in pawn, but changing the amount from the original's twenty-banknote (worth little at the time) to one dollar, as well as shifting the setting from the mid-19th century to the 1920s and relocating it from the banks of the Danube to a seaport. The film was one of the last super-productions of the declining Hungarian film industry of the 1920s, and followed popular American film formulae."

"Maggie is a Cinderella in the house of the rich but tight-fisted loan shark.  She wears clothes one or two sizes too small, has a dishevelled hairdo, and sleeps on the floor beside the dog, wrapping herself in an old man’s coat, and dreaming her shabby clothes are magically transformed into an evening dress beautiful enough to greet the visit of a prince in a stately carriage. The scriptwriter not only adds the successful Hollywood myth of Cinderella to Jókai’s short story, but also inserts the story of the Prodigal Son, borrowed from the Bible."

"A tinted nitrate copy of the film survived in the collection of the Cineteca Italiana, with the main title Per un dollaro and Italian intertitles, but with certain parts already starting to decay. The safety print produced in 1998 at the Hungarian National Film Archive unfortunately reflects image defects arising from the separation of the emulsion." – Gyongyi Balogh (GCM)

AA: I saw the first 30 minutes. The story reminds me of Hjalmar Bergman's Mästerman, filmed by and starring Victor Sjöström.