Music Box (1989) on Netflix
PG-1319892h 4mCrimeDramaThriller
Mike Laszlo, a Hungarian immigrant in Chicago, is accused of commanding a wartime Arrow Cross death squad. His daughter Ann, a defense attorney, takes his case; he blames a communist plot.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.4/109,850 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes75%
Trailer
Plot summary
Mike Laszlo came to the United States from Hungary nearly fifty years ago and has done well for himself in Chicago. After the Russians release secret wartime records, the government accuses him of being Mishka, the commander of an Arrow Cross squad that tortured and killed Jews, Roma and the gentiles who sheltered them in Budapest, and seeks to revoke his citizenship. Laszlo insists it is mistaken identity and a communist plot to discredit him, and he asks his daughter Ann, a defense attorney, to represent him. Ann takes on prosecuting attorney Jack Burke and the Office of Special Investigations, and starts examining the witnesses and the documents they present at the hearings.
Cast
- J.S. Blockas Judge Silver
- Magda Szekely Marburgas Judit Hollo
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Music Box (1989)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- According to his book Hollywood Animal, Joe Eszterhas wrote the screenplay almost ten years before learning, at age 45, that his own father had concealed his wartime involvement in Hungary's Fascist and militantly racist Arrow Cross Party, organizing book burnings and anti-Semitic propaganda.
- Both Walter Matthau and Kirk Douglas were in talks with Costa-Gavras to play the part of Mike Laszlo, but the director chose Armin Mueller-Stahl, an East German defector who had difficulty obtaining a US visa because he was suspected of ties to the Stasi.
- Joe Eszterhas had given his father a copy of the Music Box script to read before the movie was made, never thinking that his own life would soon come to reflect his art.
- Jessica Lange, normally a method actor who draws on lived experience, said she abandoned that approach for this role because nothing in her own life compared to her character's betrayal and heartbreak, instead treating the part like a child's game of make-believe while still researching Hungarian history and the Holocaust.
- Music Box, which won the Golden Bear at the 40th Berlin International Film Festival, is loosely based on the real life case of John Demjanjuk.
