Professor Hannibal

A timid man teaching Latin at a school in Hungary publishes a small study of the Carthaginian commander Hannibal. The piece contains a reading that the nationalist circles of the day do not like. Before long the newspapers, his colleagues and the street have him as a target. Without understanding what has happened, the teacher becomes a case, and nobody stands beside him. Zoltán Fábri's film is set in the Hungary between the wars and describes the oppressive air of that period. But it was made in 1956, just before the uprising, so it was looking at its own time as well. Ernő Szabó plays the teacher. The telling does not ennoble its hero; it shows a frightened man who backs down and ends up alone. How the mob forms is the real subject.