The excellent review by DLewis gives much food for thought. As he poits out, it is certainly not the only Hungarian film by Mihály Kertész alias Michael Curtiz to survive, although the 1914 feature A Tolonc is the only other one I have personally seen. However the date of this film is as interesting as its nature. All accounts of Curtiz' departure from Hungary tend to support his story. Even the German and Hungarian versions of Wikipedia talk of his leaving after the Communist takeover in 1919. Something of a time-server by nature, Kertész/Curtiz seems never to have harboured much in the way of principles either politically or professionally and to leave because the film-industry was nationalised (as he claimed) would be entirely in character.
Nevertheless the date of this film (and his first Austrian film did not appear until November) suggest that he did not rush to leave Hungary after the Revolution and was quite prepared to run out propaganda for the new regime and may in fact have left for Austria, as the Communist leaders did (although many continued on to Russia) in early August 1919 to avoid the "White Terror". He had already made two other full-length films in 1919 and four months would have been ample time for him to turn out another feature in Austria.
This possibility seems even stronger when one notices that that first Austrian film was written by the same writer who adapted the Frakas poem - Iván Siklósi and that both films had the same female star - Loraine Doraine, Kertész's first wife. Siklósi also scripted Kertész' 1921 Austrian film Herzogin Satanella, which again starred Doraine.
The Ashkenazim in Hungary were quite strongly implicated both in the freedom struggle of the nineteenth-century against Austria and in the socialist/communist movements (like their counterparts in Russia and the Ukraine).
As DLewis points out, it would not have looked good for him had this film come to light when the US white terror was at its height and the HUAAC was inveighing against his Mission for Moscow and other. Alexander Korda who left Hungary at the same time but based himself in Britain rather than the US and was beyond the reach of McCarthyism, made no bones about the fact that he had left to avoid "the White Terror". pro-Russian propaganda films made during the war.
The reason for basing a short film on a poem at this time were obviously very specific to the propaganda purpose. Farkas' short poem was published in the same year and used as a poster. Like Curtiz he would join other exiles Austria (although in his case via Romania), only returning to Hungary in 1928.
Another reviewer is, however, quite wrong in supposing that films based on poems were a dead letter by 1919. On the contrary, some of the best films based on poems were made at this time - Sjöström's Terje Vigen and Oxilia's Rhapsodica Satanica both in 1917, the best of them all in my view the wonderful Australian film The Sentimental Bloke also 1919, The Old Swimmin' Hole in 1920 and The Village Blacksmith in 1922 - by a certain Jack Ford, no less.
