Sunshine (2000) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

The varied ethnic composition of the people is the lesser component of the formula. Hungarians might look like Scandinavians, or they might look like Turks, or anything in between. Hungary had a substantial Jewish and Gypsy population before WW2, and is still home to many gypsies, Romanians, and other minorities. Because the Hungarian women have always been considered both beautiful and pleasant, they have been treasured as brides by Germans, Poles, Russians, and anybody else who wandered along with an eye for female pulchritude mixed with a sensible disposition. I was in love with a Hungarian woman myself, even tried to figure out a way to continue the relationship when I left Hungary, but could not and moved on. She came from a rich family that had its land restored from pre-Communist times. I wonder sometimes if I could have found some way to manage parts of her father's estates, but I didn't speak Hungarian, so there was no life for me there, and she didn't speak English, so there was no life for her here. (We communicated in German. We were both employed by an Austrian company.) I still think about her, and saved all her letters, although I don't keep in touch any more. The point is that the desirability of the women caused Hungarian blood to become even more mixed, so that you can't really say "he looks Hungarian". I don't know what a Hungarian looks like. Even in the small towns, there was a wide diversity of physical types. 

The greater component of my microcosm formula is the political history of Hungary in the 20th century. Imagine this. The country began the century with an emperor. There was a Communist revolution in Hungary a couple years after the USSR was formed, but this first experiment with Communism was short-lived. The Communists were overthrown by a right-wing military coup, and this rule eventually became so fascistic that it Nazified, and Hungary fought for the Axis in WW2. When the war ended, the Soviet Union gained hegemony over the country, and the second period of Communism began. Ten years later, the Hungarians tried to gain their freedom from Communism in a revolt which turned into one of the great televised spectacles of the era. The Hungarian revolt was suppressed by Russia, but not until the end of a brave and quixotic struggle which pitted Russian tanks against barefoot Hungarian children in the streets of Pest. The rag-tag revolutionaries held their own for a few days, even captured a few tanks. They exploited a flaw in the Russian communications system to blast some of the Russian tanks away with other Russian tanks, and even got some Russians shooting at other Russians by swapping the flags on their tanks. Of course, the Magyar struggle against mighty Russia was doomed without help from the West, and the Western democracies had no taste for waging a war on the nuclear precipice, so they sat by as the Soviets eventually squelched the pseudo-revolution with sheer muscle.

But the Russians were far more embarrassed and, in a typical Soviet move, eliminated the Hungarian revolution from their textbooks completely. "That's right, comrade, it never existed. The glorious Soviet system is so ideal that surely nobody would oppose it. And if a bunch of dirty-faced children did oppose it, surely they wouldn't hold their own against the glorious might of the Red Army which single-handedly defeated the Germans!" 

I guess the point I'm making here is that Hungary was the perfect setting for one of those multi-generational family epics in which fictional family members mix freely with real historical figures. Hollywood used to make zillions of these pictures and mini-series in which the family improved its economic fate every generation, but perhaps lost the original integrity of the patriarch. You know the genre. Immigrant grandpa was sweeping the floor when Edison invented the light bulb, and the swabbie dad played a game of 8-ball once with FDR when the great man was Secretary of the Navy, and the lawyer grandson was a Nixon aide who went to prison. Usually they tried to make the fictional character responsible for something integral to the world. Ol' grandpa would be the guy who somehow recommended tungsten to Edison, and dad would tell FDR he looked stirring in firelight, and the kid recommended the taping system to Nixon. Forrest Gump was both a satire of and an homage to this kind of film. (Actually, the book was a satire, but the film lost most of that edge in a sentimental deluge of mush.)

This is one of those multi-generation thingies. It is kind of a soap opera like "Rich Man, Poor Man", filled with people marrying their stepsisters and humping their brothers-in-law and such, but it is also an incisive look at the social milieu of 20th century Europe and its specific relationship with its Jewish minority. The family consisted of prosperous and proud Jews at the turn of the century, but as the generations passed, they first changed their name to Sors to become more Hungarian, and then some of them became Roman Catholics to assimilate still further. Ultimately, their efforts didn't matter. The middle generation consisted mainly of a championship fencer who was applauded by the Nazis in the 1936 Olympics, then was killed in a concentration camp despite the fact that he was a national hero of a German ally, and a Roman Catholic by faith.

At last, the final generation in the film went back to the old family name, stopped denying their heritage, and "someone in our family breathed freely for the first time in generations"

The film really does a good job at showing how and why people allied with various movements that seemed repulsive in retrospect. Many Jews were happy to see the first socialist regime deposed and the military take power. They were prosperous, successful people who had no interest in socialism. Of course, that reign turned to fascism. Needless to say, many Jews subsequently became Communists when Communism emerged as the sworn enemy of the Nazis.  Later, many Jews became anti-Communists when Stalin sought to disprove the common belief that Communism was a Zionist conspiracy. Well, you can imagine the methods that Stalin, being Stalin, chose to make his point.

Alignment was the story of the 20th century, wasn't it? It isn't just Jewish people that got caught in the -isms. The middle of the century turned out to be a great struggle between two great monsters, Hitler and Stalin, with two monstrous ideologies. For the Jews, Hitler was the ultimate enemy, so there were many Jews who ended up on the Communist side of the struggle. But for American capitalism, Communism was the ultimate enemy, and many Americans ended up sympathetic to Germany because the Germans stood as an obstacle to the spread of Marxist-Leninist dogma. Many Americans wanted to stay neutral in WW2, and the country did stay neutral long after FDR was convinced it could not be. It was only the attack on American soil that finally forced the USA into the war. 

Only Churchill stood above all the -isms with a clear head. When asked if he thought that England should align itself with such a monster as Stalin and such a monstrous ideology as Communism, Churchill replied in unambiguous terms that if Hitler were to invade hell, he would sign a pact with Satan. The problem was that Churchill seemed to be the only man in America or Britain who caught on right from the beginning. Plenty of people thought that Hitler could be trusted, or that he was our point man against Communism in Europe.

The film was written and directed by Hungarian Istvan Szabo, and much of it was filmed on location in Hungary. 

Scoopy had it exactly right, but he originally rated it C+, as it was his type of movie, and he was not sure of crossover appeal.

It is not my sort of genre, and I liked it very much, despite its three hour running time and frequent voice-over. Hungry has been added to my list of travel destinations based on the locations and photography.