Territorial Imperative

Translations have killed more classics than censorship. The Boys of Paul Street, by Ferenc Molnar, is a favorite throughout Europe, but the awkward English version has kept it unreadable in the U.S. for nearly half a century. This film of the 1927 novel belatedly corrects the neglect with a careful, correct adaptation.

As the 20th century disfigures a city, groups of teen-age boys skirmish over its last remaining vacant lot. A territorial imperative drives them into paramilitary gangs, complete with bugles, spears and articles of war. As is common with armies and youths, the weakest individual is the most brutalized. He is Nemecsek (Anthony Kemp), the smallest and most sensitive of the Paul Street boys, who would sacrifice anything--including his life--to gain the recognition of his classmates. His chance soon comes. Already snuffling with a severe cold, Nemecsek ventures onto the turf of the dreaded Red Shirts, gets caught and thrown into a lake. He contracts a fatal illness; burning with fever, he helps the Paul Street boys to victory, then is taken home to die. A week later the disputed ground itself is sentenced to death as the site of a new apartment house. The sacrifice, the armies, the war itself were only a series of absurdities.

The use of schoolboys as a microcosm is hardly new. From The Lord of the Flies to Young Torless to If . . . . the metaphor is made and remade until it seems ready to become a staple of film culture, like the western. The Boys of Paul Street, a joint U.S.-Hungarian production, maintains the tradition without illuminating it. Still, its decelerated rhythms and nostalgic photography provide a rare glimpse of that era when good and evil were different colors and student protest was a whispered grievance in a corridor.

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