Most people will consider that Yul Brynner's greatest performance was as the ruler of Siam in THE KING AND I. Certainly it gave him a wide variety of moods to test his abilities in, from comic, to tragic, from eager to learn to dominating to hateful. It also showed him to advantage as a "talk singer" and a dancer. Finally, as it was also his Tony Award winning performance from Broadway, the film allowed us to capture something of the great Broadway performance as well.

But he did other movies that showed his talents as well as THE KING AND I. His comic turn in ONCE MORE WITH FEELING was quite nice. So was his performance as General Bunin in ANASTASIA, or his Ramses in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. Yet he came terribly close to being a 1950s successor to Eric Von Stroheim as "the man you love to hate." A certain vulnerability in his acting and roles endeared him to the movie public, even after his best years as a star were behind him - and he retreated more and more to repeating the King of Siam on television and the stage.

To me, his finest performance is in this 1959 drama with Deborah Kerr, Jason Robards Jr., Robert Morley, E. G. Marshall, Anne Jackson, and Ronnie Howard. The film is set in pretty modern times - the powder-keg that was Hungary in 1956, when briefly it looked like the Iron Curtain was about to collapse there under the reforms of Hungarian patriot Imre Nagy and his supporters. But the Hungarian Revolution collapsed due to bad timing. The Russians and their Polish and East German allies sent tanks in to crush the revolt (and arrested and executed Nagy and other reformers). The West stood by and let this happen: England and France had gotten caught in the Suez crisis, and the U.S. had berated them and Israel for attacking Egypt. Due to the actions of three close allies of the U.S., the West found it hard to condemn the overkill of the Soviet Union. It was an unfortunate situation, and the Hungarians have never forgotten how they were abandoned in it.

In the film Brynner is Major Surov, a Russian intelligence officer who is watching for some of the leaders of the Hungarian revolt, one of whom is Paul Kedes (Jason Robards). Kedes may be getting assistance from some westerners on a bus tour through Hungary, led by Robert Morley (including Marshall, Jackson, and Howard, and Kerr). The latter are being kept in a hotel while their bus is being repaired, and Brynner mingles with them, hoping for a lead to the whereabouts of Robards. But Brynner is human - he tries to be ingratiating with these people (all of whom see him as a monster), and in sequence, when he has drunk a little too much, he confronts them with the questions that has bothered historians since 1945: How is it (even if one notes that Russia had Stalin in charge) that relations between Russia and the West collapsed so quickly? The allies, on the whole, had worked well together from 1941 to 1945, but after Yalta and Potsdam all types of mutual suspicions just erupted. Did they have to? Surov is a good officer, but he is torn in half by loyalty to the Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and in Hungary that he supports, and his growing fondness towards Kerr, who is hiding Robards but is also willing to note the more human side of the Russian major. And as the film reaches it's tragic climax, we watch as Surov has to decide if he will follow his sense of duty, or take pity on Kerr, Robards, and the other westerners who want to leave. It becomes a true struggle for him - and one that he may win far too late. It was a great film about a tragedy of post war Europe, and possibly the most thoughtful role Yul Brynner ever portrayed.

Sentiment: positive