I was out of the country at the time, so I initially missed this Guardian obituary of the Hungarian actor Iván Darvas (1925-2007) when it was published on 5 September – and even that was nearly two months late, as he actually died on 3 June, before this blog was even launched.
I only knew Darvas from his lead roles in the two Károly Makk films that were released on DVD in Britain by Second Run – Love (Szerelem, 1970) and A Long Weekend in Pest and Buda (Egy hét Pesten és Budán, 2003), both very highly recommended (especially Love, which is widely regarded as one of the greatest Hungarian films). And now that I know rather more about his past as an active participant in the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the level of conviction he brought to both of those performances (where his characters have an unspecified political past) is all too explicable.
Rather less missed will be the late Russian composer Tikhon Khrennikov (1913-2007), the subject of a splendidly splenetic obituary by Russian music expert Gerald McBurney in today’s Guardian. Khrennikov’s contribution to Soviet cinema was relatively minimal (though Alexander Ptushko’s 1972 Ruslan and Ludmila/Руслан и Людмила is out on DVD), but his influence on Soviet music was vast and mostly malign, his behind-the-scenes support of individual composers notwithstanding.