New 35mm Restoration

(Két lány az utcán). Best known for gritty, fast-moving genre films like Pitfall, House of Wax, and Crime Wave, director André De Toth began his career in his native Hungary with more realist, mannered works, like this surprisingly polished melodrama involving two young women looking to get ahead in 1930s Budapest, and the alternately doltish and threatening men hoping to prevent it. Seen today, Two Girls on the Street (supposedly one of five films directed by De Toth in 1939!) is eye opening for its confidently modern aesthetics; its quick editing, glossy set designs, and sophisticated camera movements are easily on a par with-or better than-anything that Hollywood had produced. Such sophisticated Hungarian films would not last, of course; with the outbreak of World War II the industry came under increasingly iron-fisted control, and De Toth slipped away, first to England, and, finally, to Hollywood.