Budapest Noir

Having read the original novel, I was excited to see this movie since I loved the book.

As always, movies introduce changes from their original books to make the movie more "movie-like", and while I understand that it is difficult to have source material that is hundreds of pages long, something has got to go, I felt that they made some significant changes that lead to a worse movie.

In the books Zsigmond Gordon is quite a nice guy. He treats his girlfriend/wife all in all pretty well. In the movie he is portrayed as a bit of a chauvinist, a womanizer. The madame at the wh**e-house was also portrayed in a very different way, in the book she was sad and lonely. And so on, there are several changes like this.

Several of the locations felt very much like shot in a studio lot, which was also a shame since it would've given much more authenticity to the movie if more was shot in Budapest. But a difficult thing to pull of, logistically. The direction and acting was stiff at times, but all in all, not bad for a Hungarian movie with a limited budget.

In any case, a watchable movie!