Q&A 4/22 with Larry Ferber

Most famously sung by Billie Holiday, the evocative song "Gloomy Sunday" was notorious for allegedly driving people to suicide, and is the inspiration for this love story with a twist. Set in the early 1930s in the lush and romantic city of Budapest, Laszlo Szabo runs a restaurant and is in love with his beautiful hostess, Ilona. They then hire a piano player named Andras who falls in love with Ilona as well. Caring deeply for one another, they arrive at a cozy accommodation. Andras then composes the song "Gloomy Sunday" which sweeps the world. Soon war comes, and while it is well known what the Nazis are doing to the Jews, but Laszlo, who is Jewish, and has had more than one chance to escape, remains. The carefree days of romance and denial are over.

Gloomy Sunday takes an intriguing premise – that the titular song was so depressing that people throughout the world spun it on their record player as they took their own lives – and fictionalizes it to the point of tedium. The actual song was composed in 1933 by a Budapest citizen named Rezso Seress. The film's story begins in 1930s Budapest, but that's about its only connection to real life. Here the composer is a lonely restaurant pianist named Andras, who writes the song for the beautiful Ilona, the woman who runs the restaurant together with her Jewish lover Laszlo.

Did somebody say "Jewish"? Yep, the moment you finally hear that loaded word, halfway into the film, you know it's just a matter of minutes before the story swerves from a complicated love triangle between our three heroes into yet another Holocaust tragedy. Cue the return of the lonely German who longs for Ilona and nearly drowned himself for her... only now he's wearing a crisp black SS uniform. You've seen it all before in a dozen other WWII films.

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