Dad is right

My dad is a fan of Anthony Quinn. He has his reasons, no doubt, but I think he likes him because he reminds him of a dear one (in my family, we’re into the habit of matching famous actors to one of the members of our family – that’s how I got to assigning the looks of Mel Gibson to my nephew).

Thus, it was from my father that I learned recently that Anthony Quinn had played the role of a Romanian peasant. I went straight to IMDB to check. Ever since I learned that I do not know it all, I first go and check before contradicting him. And so I found that Anthony Quinn did play the role of a Romanian peasant in the movie The 25^th Hour, based on the novel of the same name by the writer C. Virgil Gheorghiu.

I searched it and saw it online. It is really a good movie, and the script is really good, too. The actors performed wonderfully and I can assure you that you won’t lose your time seeing it.

The movie impressed me from the beginning, I must say. It swirled me away with the Romanian music and the picture on the wall inside the house of one of our dear Romanian writers (Ion Creangă).

Johann Moritz, played by Anthony Quinn, is a Romanian peasant from Transylvania. In 1939, Johann is denounced as Jew and is sent to a Romanian concentration camp. Then, mistakenly, he is enrolled in the SS army and appears on the covers of German magazines and books. Brought at Nuremberg trials for war crimes, Johann is acquitted due to a letter written by his wife, Suzanna.

Another interesting character is the writer Traian Koruga. Here below is an excerpt of a moving dialogue between Traian and Johann:

‘I do not want to see anymore, I’ve seen enough.’

‘But, Traian, there are so many good things to look at’.

‘I’ve looked at the sky, sea, mountains, and men… Men who think, but so many mad men!’

The final scene of the movie, the one with the smile, is by far the most staggering. ‘C’mon, you can do better than this’, says a photographer trying to encourage Johann to smile at the time of his encounter with his lost family. That encouragement to give a ‘big smile’ made me think of the question asked by the old ladies at the end of the ‘Silent wedding’ movie by Horațiu Mălăele: ‘What else do you want to take from us?’.

Smile as torture, that’s what this scene made me think of.

So please do watch this movie. My father recommends. And so do I.