This subtitled Hungarian drama is highly reminiscent of one of Spencer Tracy's Oscar-nominated outings, Bad Day at Black Rock. When a stranger comes to a small town, people start assuming he's got a worrisome agenda, and they start scrambling to cover their guilty secrets. In this case, the small town is in post-war Hungary. Two Jewish men get off a train, carrying boxes, and trekking through the village. No one knows why they've come, and many have reasons to fear a return of the Jews who used to live there, before their properties were confiscated and redistributed when the Nazis sent them to the camps.

One man is guilt-ridden over his role in the incarceration of former friends. Others are hell-bent on keeping whatever they obtained, rather than having those former neighbors or their relatives recoup what was taken.

Like the Tracy film, this one is shot in black-and-white, and presented tersely, leaving room for viewers to fill in the spaces between the lines and actions. The absence of color, which I usually dislike, seems appropriate here, linking it to familiar newsreel and fictional depictions of the era. It also highlights the bleakness of life in the aftermath of all the horrors World War II wrought throughout Europe, on the battlefields and beyond. Living with one's inner demons can exact a toll on collaborators, as well as combatants.

There's not much action, and no archival footage. This one's all about the residents, the choices they made, and the varied consequences therefrom. A serious film for serious viewers. Although the specifics of the plot are rooted in the Holocaust and its after-effects, the responsibility and accountability of individuals in the midst of such political tides is a timeless and vital theme.

This subtitled Hungarian picture is definitely worth the time. Through the microcosm of one summer day in a single village, it looks back on the origins of modern Hungary at a moment of balance, when the pre-war fascist government had been destroyed by the war but the Communists had not yet seized power.

By way of background, American viewers should realize that before World War II Hungary had a fascist government, independent but allied with Nazi Germany. The Hungarian Army fought, not very effectively, in Russia. Until the Germans occupied the country in March 1944, Hungarian Jews were persecuted but not systematically exterminated. Once the Germans arrived, the government rounded up the Jews outside Budapest for shipment to Auschwitz. Between Christmas 1944 and February 1945, the Hungarians defended Budapest house by house against the Red Army alongside the Waffen SS, while Hungarian Nazis in the Arrow Cross Party roamed the city shooting every Jew they could find. Both Russians and Magyars regarded Hungary as having been conquered, not liberated.

1945 takes place on a single day, August 12, 1945. World War II in Europe has been over for three months; as the radio tells us in the background, the Pacific War is winding down with the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan. In a country village so remote that it's a mile walk to the railroad station, we meet the bullying, backslapping local Big Shot, his unhappy, drug addicted wife, and their son, who is marrying a pretty peasant girl that afternoon. The son runs the local drugstore. He's an upward match for the bride to be, who used to be engaged to a strapping but surly young peasant she hasn't quite left behind. Her jilted ex-fiancé, an Army veteran, seems to be taking seriously Russian promises of a new and better Hungary. This soon after the war, the occupying Red Army is definitely in evidence but doesn't have things nailed down yet, as the radio in the background broadcasts news about the upcoming multi-party elections.

Intercut with all this, at the station, two men dressed in black arrive on the morning train. The elder, white haired and bearded, wears a broad brimmed round hat and long coat; his younger companion a stubbly beard, cloth cap and short jacket. Their two large crates are unloaded from the baggage car; the manifest says they contain perfume and cosmetics. Three Red Army soldiers in a jeep watch impassively. All this throws the stationmaster into a dither. After failing to get through to the Big Shot on the phone, he tells the peasant waiting with horse and wagon to deliver the men and their baggage to town s-l-o-w-l-y, while he bicycles ahead. When he gets to town he excitedly tells the Big Shot, "They're back!"

The two men, of course, are Jews, though not individual Jews anybody recognizes. As they plod down the road from the station, their imminent arrival sets off a paroxysm of fear, guilt, recrimination and anger ricocheting through the village, fueled by the alcohol that the village men are constantly drinking. Nobody knows who these two Jews are, but everyone assumes that they have come back to claim the property of the local Jews deported about a year ago. The Big Shot, the stationmaster, the priest and the village policeman are implicated up to their necks. So are those villagers who looted the property of the deported Jews and were given their houses by the government. The Big Shot, in particular, seems to have gone out of his way to make sure that his one-time best friend, the Jew who owned the drugstore, got shipped off right away. The omnipresence of the Russians means the village elite can't solve this problem the way they'd like to. Instead, as they wait to find out who these two Jews are, what they want, and what's in those crates, certainties dissolve, truths are told, relationships collapse under the strain and hypocrisies are mobilized. I can't reveal more without spoiling the surprises. The Hungarian audience can fill in the blanks about what is going to happen to all these people once the Communists takeover overwhelms their petty concerns.

1945 reminded me of High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider, in which Clint Eastwood played characters who may be real or may be the ghost of a murdered man, and whose arrival causes the local power structure to come unstuck. The two Jews are far less active than Eastwood's characters , but they have the same unsettling effect. Moreover, they seem in some respects unreal. They are both surprisingly healthy, strong and well fed for men who would have been liberated from the camps only three months before, walking the mile from station to village without difficulty. They speak only when spoken to by the locals. Their cargo ultimately seems as much symbolic as actual, and they silently board the evening train out at the end of the day, their work done. They are as much the locals' memory of a Jewish type ("hats and beards, they all look alike") as they are individuals.

I don't know what the director had in mind, but this is a plausible reading. In any event, while no admirer of the Soviets, he is far from nostalgic for the old Hungary that they overran and overthrew. I'm surprised that the picture could get made in Viktor Orban's nationalist, dictatorial, anti-Semitic Hungary.

During wars, people do hidious crimes. At WW2 many decent, next door people like you and me, took advantage of the anti-jewish pogrom and stole their property. But the war ended in 1945, and some of them manage to return and reclaim their properties... what happened then? The guilt of course, that's what happened. I think it's the only Hungarian film i have ever watched and if you come across it, don't pass it by. Its a film worth seeing.