The best József Bihari’s drama movies

dr. Benedek Gábor, a famous solicitor in Eger, is the defense counsel of a murderer, who killed his wife out of jealousy. Gábor lives in a happy marriage with Anna. One day, however, Szentgyörgyi Péter, a famous pianist, comes to Eger. He once was loved by Anna, who in those days was training to become an artist herself. Gábor has no knowledge of these events of the past. He, therefore, associates the now renewed relationship with the story of the murderer he is the legal representative of.

A group of landless Hungarian peasants accept work as migrant-laborers on a farm in northern Germany where the wages are good, and the wives and family are allowed to accompany them. Though it is in the midst of World War II, they are relatively well-off. However, they glimpse the treatment accorded to POWs and others who are not so gently treated, and at the conclusion of the year's harvest, they choose to return to Hungary and are quickly swept up in the tides of war. This film is part of a series of films by award-winning, well-respected director Zoltan Fabri who devoted much time and effort chronicling the struggle against fascism.

Nagy István, the formerly poor peasant boy returns to his native village as a teacher. His conviction is that the abyss between rich and poor can be diminished by good will. The rich Böröcz Horváth Klári returns his love, and also Böröcz Horváth is willing to help the poorest family, the Bakos. Bakos Jóska, who was sent to serve the tough Böröcz Horváth as a payment, dies of an infected wound and the people in the village hold the teacher liable as well. Nagy István realises, that the abyss cannot be ceased, what is more, it is impassable. He breaks up with his fiancée and stands by the side of the poor.

Mihály Zágon has been struggling with his conservative mother-in-law for a long time. Now, that his wife is pregnant, the old woman wants Piroska to stay in bed. Mihály is elected to be the president of the co-operative, but nobody is happy about this back home. His wife often pretends to be ill to keep him by her side.

Three people – a returned prisoner of war, his beautiful second wife, and the possessive, hunchbacked spinster who is his sister-in-law by his first marriage – are isolated in a little house under an extinct volcano, where each strives for personal happiness but is suffocated by their dependence on the others.

March 15, 1848; the revolution breaks out in the town of Pest. Yet at café Pilvax, in among he revolutionary youth, there is the informer of the imperial court as well. Hearing the news of the attack led by Jellasics, the inhabitants of the villages pour into the national army, and Hajdú Gyurka also escapes from his landlord. Petőfi is there at the camp of the revolutionaries, raising them to enthusiasm with his poetry.

A Hungarian soldier returning from fighting in the Second World War marries the woman he believes to be the widow of a former comrade who he thinks died in the Prisoner of War camp in which they were held. The film was banned in Hungary because of its depiction of the controversial issue of Hungarian prisoners held by the Soviets.

A female spy goes to Budapest to steal the plans of an anti-aircraft gun.

A simple, religious Hungarian woodcutter lives with his wife and boy child with a small community of squatters among the peaceful mountains of Transylvania until a lumber company claims their land and forces them all to become company workers or else leave the land. This 1942 Hungarian film takes a detailed and unflinching look at the hardships of mountain living, and the realistic approach proved influential to the Neorealist movement in Italian cinema. Hungarian master director Istvan Szots won the Biennale Cup at the Venice Film Festival for his auspicious debut, but the film was banned by the Nazis as "too Catholic" and not publicly exhibited until after World War II.