Sons of the Stone-Hearted Man

The film was adapted from a novel by Mór Jókai. The account is set in Hungary. The man at the head of the Baradlay family dies. He was a hard landowner who stood with the emperor. He leaves a heavy will behind. In it the lives of his three sons and his wife are laid out one by one. One son is to take a post in Russia. Another is to become a soldier and never marry. The third is to work as an official in Vienna. But in 1848 the uprising begins. All three brothers step off the road their father drew. Their mother stands with them in that break. The rivalry among them is part of the account too. Mária Sulyok and Tibor Bitskey take the leads, with Károly Mécs and Ilona Béres also in the cast, in Zoltán Várkonyi’s Hungarian film of 1965.