Two Girls on the Street: All Is Lies

Early in Two Girls on the Street (1939), the third of five films that André de Toth made in his native Hungary at the outset of his long directing career, something happens that predicts both the mood and the concerns of de Toth’s future work in Hollywood. Vica (Bella Bordy), newly arrived in Budapest and working on a construction site, has received permission to sleep in the storage room adjoining the architect’s office. Working at his desk late at night, the architect, Csiszár (Andor Ajtay), at first shows no interest in Vica. Then, through the open doorway to the storage room, he sees her shadow on the wall as she undresses. The shadow distracts him more and more—and de Toth cuts back to it insistently—until, after checking his watch twice in a businesslike manner, Csiszár walks toward the door and enters the room.

The scene evokes the world of total unreliability that we encounter in such later de Toth films as Ramrod (1947), House of Wax, Crime Wave (both 1953), Riding Shotgun (1954), The Two-Headed Spy (1958), and Man on a String (1960), a world in which situations and affections reverse themselves in a moment. With the arbitrariness of a Luis Buñuel film or one by Fritz Lang, de Toth shows desire born out of architecture, the doorway creating an unforeseen passage between Csiszár’s space of straight lines and the cluttered room in which Vica’s shadow flickers. Furthermore, in showing an attempted sexual assault by the character whom the audience will eventually be urged to accept as its male romantic lead, Two Girls on the Street also points toward the persistent undermining to which de Toth subjects the moral stature of such heroes as Dick Powell in Pitfall (1948) and Richard Widmark in Slattery’s Hurricane (1949).

De Toth later dismissed his Hungarian films—which he made under the name Endre Tóth—as “very bad,” nonetheless adding that “in each of them, I tried to experiment, to introduce something that was unusual, at least in the context of Hungarian cinema.” Wedding in Toprin, his (already very good, despite his own appraisal) 1939 directorial debut, is a romantic melodrama of espionage. He followed it with The Five-Forty (also 1939), a rare Hungarian attempt, in that period, at a murder mystery. Two Girls on the Street was based on a 1929 play of the same title by Rezsö Török and Tamás Emöd. De Toth claimed to have written or cowritten the scripts of many of the films he directed; Two Girls is one of the few for which he received a writing credit, and there is no reason to doubt that he had a high degree of personal involvement in the project. Rediscovered today, it is an invigorating film that shows de Toth’s taste for jarring visual tensions and his drive to find something fresh and real in any situation and any location.

The second of the two girls of the title is Gyöngyi (Mária Tasnádi Fekete, also known as Maria von Tasnady), a young woman who has been driven from her wealthy family by the scandal of an affair that led to a terminated pregnancy. Meeting Vica by chance, Gyöngyi takes her under her wing, and Vica soon returns the favor by shaming Gyöngyi’s father into giving her financial support. In a lovely long take, Gyöngyi and Vica inspect an empty apartment in the now-completed modern building where Vica had carried mortar. The fluidity of the camera imitates the two women’s confidence as they pass from the main room to a smaller one, which Vica explores while, in the background, Gyöngyi and the building agent go out onto the veranda, before they all regroup and leave the apartment. Later, by using a 360-degree-plus pan to follow Gyöngyi and Csiszár around a nightclub dance floor, de Toth poses himself a technical problem whose solution generates a certain exhilaration in the viewer—as will happen again in the faster, more violent dance of Day of the Outlaw (1959), one of his best films.

De Toth pushes the limits of genre with radical stylistic choices—using multiple-image shots and undercranking to portray Vica’s late-film calvary along the Danube, for example—and by taking up a critical point of view that makes Two Girls a precursor to the director’s astringent postwar thrillers. He views his two heroines’ progress through several strata of Budapest society with vigorous compassion. The shots of people, including children, crowding in front of signposts in the early sequence of Gyöngyi searching for work reveal that both unemployment and child labor are problems in this city. Nor does the film harbor any illusions about rural life. The village bell of de Toth’s swift prologue symbolizes not the cohesion of community but rather malicious rumor and intolerance. When Gyöngyi learns she and Vica share a place of origin, the apathy with which she asks, “What’s new at home?” shows that an answer is not expected.

De Toth places great emphasis on the moment at Vica’s construction site in which, under a nocturnal downpour, the two women form a pair for the first time. As they walk away from the camera, they get smaller and smaller but also move higher in the frame—a triumphant movement underscored by the vigorous pulse of the musical score. This bravura shot sets up the central movement of the narrative, whereby the two women’s relationship makes both of them stronger. Abandoning her naive-little-girl persona (a put-on that both Gyöngyi and Csiszár see through), Vica is moved to champion human dignity against the corruption of a society in which, as Csiszár expresses it, everything and everybody can be bought. Her moral growth is paralleled by Gyöngyi’s rise to fame as a concert violinist—which links Gyöngyi to Barbara Stanwyck’s pianist in The Other Love (1947), another of the exceptional de Toth works (with 1944’s Dark Waters) in which women are the main characters.

What viewers today are likely to see as a main weakness of Two Girls on the Street—the insubstantiality of Csiszár as a hero—can also be seen as part of its critique. Covering his aggressiveness and arrogance (which flare up in his site office with Vica) with a veneer of sophistication, Csiszár represents the height of empty authority in the world of the film. When Vica joins him on top of the construction site in the last scene (a moment that, strangely, anticipates the ending of King Vidor’s The Fountainhead), the hyperbole of the low camera angle reads as ironic rather than celebratory.

It is all the more difficult to see this ending as hopeful, since the most vibrant and intimate relationship in the film is that between Vica and Gyöngyi. That it starts as a surrogate mother-daughter relationship is something they both acknowledge on their first night in their new apartment. As this conversation continues, Vica lies down next to, then on top of, her roommate and holds with both hands the arm with which Gyöngyi embraces her neck. The scene dissolves as Vica kisses Gyöngyi—confirming that, though she plays at being weak and dependent, Vica is in fact the one who takes the initiative throughout the film. De Toth stages their later rupture with great verve: Gyöngyi slaps Vica, turns, and walks away in almost a single movement, the camera tracking in on Vica’s shocked and trembling face, her hand pressed to her slapped cheek.

Not only does Two Girls portray, at its center, an intimate same-sex relationship, it also features, at its periphery, a striking instance of gender ambiguity. The drummer in Gyöngyi’s female orchestra is a man who performs in drag. His presence receives no explanation. Has he assumed female clothing in order to be able to work (like the heroes of Richard Pottier’s 1935 Fanfare d’amour, based on the same story that would provide the source for Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot), thus reinforcing the film’s theme of economic insecurity? Or should we see the character as embodying a queer sexuality and identity and furthering the implicit threat to gender norms made by Gyöngyi and Vica’s bonding? In any case, it’s remarkable that, at a time when homosexuality was a crime in Hungary, this person is accepted by everyone on-screen.

After Two Girls on the Street, de Toth made two more films in Hungary: Six Weeks of Happiness (1939), a comedy, and Semmelweis (1940), a biopic of the pioneering nineteenth-century Hungarian physician. These films were well received, and de Toth could have continued a prestigious career in his native country. Instead, he left before the release of Semmelweis, boarding the Italian ocean liner Rex, which (with Ingrid Bergman also aboard) arrived in New York City on January 12, 1940. De Toth often told the story of his decision to emigrate. Hungary’s so-called First Jewish Law of 1938 had led to the purging of Jewish Hungarians from the film industry. Prolific directors such as István Székely (who would find a footing in Hollywood as Steve Sekely) were deprived of work. Another of the Jewish Hungarian directors affected, Márton Keleti, told de Toth bitterly, “If you were Jewish, you wouldn’t be working.” These words awakened a doubt that spurred de Toth to seek to prove his talent outside his country.

With this story in mind, we can see an autobiographical aspect in Two Girls on the Street. After the Nazi invasion of Poland (at which de Toth was present to take documentary footage), he confronted a Budapest whose “normally well-balanced madness,” as he put it, had tipped over, and where “everybody played the violin while the world started to burn around us.” He could have been describing the sequence devoted to Gyöngyi’s concert tour, near the end of Two Girls on the Street. As a person who betrays, but benefits from, her class—and who escapes Hungary, having entered the world of art—Gyöngyi’s progress predicts de Toth’s own. “Life is a betrayal,” de Toth said. “Sometimes you betray yourself. And then things become interesting.”

The lyrics of the theme song of Two Girls on the Street affirm the universality of betrayal, stating, in effect, that all is lies. “Save your breath,” the song’s refrain, becomes a cynical password that circulates through the film. Performed first by the female orchestra, it gets taken up by a drunken customer, then, with irony, by two of the musicians in the dressing room; from there, it moves to the higher-class milieu of the nightclub to which Csiszár takes Gyöngyi. The resurfacing of the melody in the scoring of the final scene—mixed with the relentless string ostinato from the first construction-site sequence—casts further doubt on the happiness to which Vica seems to ascend at the fade-out.

As a film that denounces the hollowness of the promises of society, Two Girls on the Street can be compared with The Rules of the Game, made the same year. Jean Renoir’s masterwork met with incomprehension on its release and needed the passage of time before its complex account of a French society in decline could be appreciated. Similarly, if de Toth’s film—a work long almost unknown outside Hungary, like most of prewar Hungarian cinema—is only now meeting with wider appreciation, that may be because hindsight has brought the subversiveness of its melding of genres and styles into sharper focus. “The decade of the 1930s became more and more the decade of confusion in every sphere of life,” de Toth wrote in his memoirs. Two Girls on the Street is both a vivid expression of that confusion and an early flowering of a directorial style that would create some of the most corrosive works of postwar American cinema.

Two Girls on the Street: All Is Lies

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