"Csak egy kislány van a világon" (roughly "The Only Girl There is in the World") is sometimes referred to as the first Hungarian sound film, but in truth it is a part-talkie. Nevertheless, it has a superb, Romany-styled music score by Károly Stephanides that is nothing like what would have been done had this film only come down to us as a silent, and a contemporary soundtrack had been made for it. It survives only in a Serbian version cut down from its original length by 22 minutes, and the one I saw was missing another 14; the continuity was especially choppy in the last chapter. But it still told the tale: Two former POWs, Gyõrgy (Pál Jávo) and Miklós (Gusztáv Vándory), return on foot to their native town and are greeted by their families. Gyõrgy falls in love with Katinka (Marta Eggerth), a lovely local girl that Miklós already had deep feelings for. At a celebration later that day, Gyõrgy and Katinka become engaged. Gyõrgy travels by train to the city where he gets entangled with a vamp (Mercedes Zombory), and when he returns to the village the vamp is in tow, leading to all kinds of complications of the heart.
"Csak egy kislány van a világon" is mainly notable as it represents the film debut of Hungarian actress Marta Eggerth, who would soon become the top star of Central European operetta films and musicals; Katinka is her only non-speaking part. Eggerth is radiantly beautiful throughout and demonstrates dramatic ability far beyond the norm for a 17-year old actress. Mercedes Zombary, in her only film role, is alluring, appropriately sexy and uncaring as the "other woman," and the two male leads handle their roles adequately if a little melodramatically. However, director Béla Gaál gets the most out of meager resources and makes what may have been a great picture here -- "may have been" as so much of it is missing. There are Russian-styled montage sequences that are ambitious and visually striking, and the overall feel of the film is rather like the style of MGM in the late silent period, but with natural settings in place of MGM's typical, studio-bound artificiality. The sense of Hungarian-ness in the film is palpable, with the bows of fiddles darting across the screen, the rhythmic pace of Gypsy music wrapping around the action and the mixture of modern and traditional dress. Despite some slow passages and ellipses in the story caused by missing footage, "Csak egy kislány van a világon" is an inspired effort with some genuinely great things in it. Director Gaál would go, with considerable success, into comedies in the 1930s, but would end his days, regrettably, in either the Dachau Concentration Camp or at the hands of Nazis on a Budapest street, depending on which account one accepts.
