David Frey's book is a well-written, deeply researched examination of the Hungarian film industry from the introduction of sound in the early 1930s to its termination by the Nazis in 1944. Frey is first and foremost a historian, and the strength of the book is the detailed, archive-based narrative of the Hungarian film industry. Frey argues that the film industry can be seen as “the most important element of the didactic nationalizing process” (7). In doing so, he narrates the remarkable success and then failure of the Hungarian film industry. But, his text also interprets the cost of this “tragic success” (8), by integrating his narrative into the history of authoritarian nationalism, the failure of the Versailles peace process, the rise of Nazism, the end of Hungary's independence, and murder of Hungarian Jewry.

Frey is at his best when narrating the complex story of film production from studio to cinema and its appropriation by nationalists. In seven chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, he covers an impressive amount of material. Starting with the technological and economic shift to sound film, he moves on to examine elite attempts to co-opt its messaging, to the international context of film distribution and state building, to tensions between Jewish expertise and Christian nationalist goals, to the tragic effects of both Christian nationalism and antisemitism on the film industry, and finally to the destruction the elite nationalists’ goal of an independent and culturally significant Hungarian, Christian state and film industry. His ability to integrate and develop the intimate details of the personalities involved as well as the often-conflicted nature of private and public control is impressive, as is his wide-ranging use of sources—Hungarian archival, artistic, and public documents, in addition to German and English archival sources and a broad historiographical knowledge of the interwar context and film history. One will find mention of well-known émigrés such as Michael Curtiz and Bela Lugosi, but the book is about Hungarian personalities and institutions, such as István Székely, Hunnia Studios, Zita Szeleczky, and István Gerő. Frey clearly has a grasp on the theoretical discussions surrounding nationalism and film as a cultural and artistic endeavor, especially within the context of modernism. The book, however, is not addressed to film theorists or theorists of modernity. At key moments, Frey makes the decision to remain on task in terms of an evidence-based narrative of Hungarian cinema. In doing so, he leaves aside detailed analysis of individual films or broader film genres. Chapter seven is a small exception to this approach, but even that chapter will leave film theorists wanting more.

What Frey seems most concerned in explaining is the irony in the failed attempt to build a Hungarian film industry, as well as a state. That irony centers on the “Jewish question,” or what to do with Jewish contributions (artistic and financial) to the building of a Christian, Magyar national film culture. When charted against the artistic, popular, and economic success of Hungarian film, Frey shows that it was “the cosmopolitan, progressive, class-crossing, Jewish-produced vision of nation” that ushered in the early success of Hungarian sound film. The Hungarian answer to the Jewish question, however, was the exclusion of Jews from the industry (as well as the rest of Hungarian society). The result was the decline in the financial and artistic success of Hungarian film by the late 1930s. This in turn drove the Hungarian government and film industry into a closer relationship with Germany. Frey's examination of the process opens up the question of why Hungary, while becoming more aligned and dependent on Germany and becoming more openly antisemitic, nonetheless fought so long for an independent Hungarian film industry, including the surreptitious employment of Jews. Why did the Hungarians not simply nationalize their film industry along the model of Goebbels? For starters, Frey shows that Hungary lacked the economic strength to make such a project work. Nationalization would have meant turning the Hungarian film industry into a pawn of Germany. Such a move would have meant ending the Hungarian “elite” dream of employing film to promote viable, Christian nationalism and would have excluded Hungary from any cultural leadership in Central Europe.

More importantly, Frey argues that the competitive, market-based structure of the industry and the artistic contribution of writers, directors, and actors schooled in a modernist, urbanist European aesthetic created a conflicted, but innovative, Hungarian style that tempered radical remaking of the industry—both in an artistic and economic sense. “In resisting the zealots,” Frey argues, “government and industry leaders grudgingly accepted the economic realities of the late 1930s and early 1940s. They realized it was impossible to remove risk and speculation, the so-called ‘Jewishness’ of capitalism, from a creative economy” (258). Frey's nuanced telling of the contradictions and catch-22s of Hungary's nationalist dreams and the technical, economic, military, and political realities (domestic and foreign) that frustrated them is fascinating. Such subtleties make the book an important contribution to the national histories of Hungary and other Central European states, which too often appear only as prologue or postscript to the striding behemoth of National Socialist Germany.

Frey's book is a welcome contribution to the interwar history of how Central European nation-states came to grips with the issues of defeat, ethnicity, economic collapse, and rising German power. The book will be most welcomed by historians, but it provides well-documented and detailed facts on the key personalities, films, and events of Hungarian cinema in its initial sound development. Though not a film studies monograph, it does engage with the necessary theory fully enough to make it a valuable read for anyone researching Hungarian film of the interwar period. The book also clearly engages the questions of antisemitism and the Holocaust in Hungary, but it does so from a distance and by showing how film laid much of the cultural groundwork for anti-Jewish policies of Hungarian state during World War II.