Two Girls on the Street (André De Toth, 1939)

Mária Tasnádi Fekete and Bella Bordy in Two Girls on the Street

Cast: Mária Tasnádi Fekete, Bella Bordy, Andor Ajtay, Piroska Vaszary, Gyula Csortos. Screenplay: André De Toth, based on a play by Tamás Emöd and Reszö Török. Cinematography: Károly Vass. Production design: Márton Vincze. Film editing: Zoltán Kerényi. Music: Szabolcs Fényes. 

In 1939, the Production Code was so rigidly enforced in Hollywood that David O. Seznick had to beg for an exemption that would allow Clark Gable to speak the word "damn" in Gone With the Wind. So for an example of what Hollywood movies might have been like if they hadn't been saddled with the Code's strictures, take a look at a film from Hungary that year, André De Toth's Two Girls on the Street. It begins with a young woman revealing, at a dinner party that celebrates an engagement, that the potential groom, who is marrying someone else, made her pregnant. Out of wedlock pregnancy would have been severely punished under the Code, but after the uproar, she moves to Budapest and gets an abortion -- one of the Code's severest taboos -- and goes to work in a night club as a violinist in an all-female orchestra. By the end of the film, she has become a celebrated concert violinist, hardly a punishment. Two Girls on the Street is a romantic melodrama whose plot feels familiar in many respects: The violinist befriends a waiflike young woman, and as they prosper they fall in love with the same man. But many of the details of the film feel like they come from another place and another time: The man they fall for was accused of sexually harassing the second woman, who also attempts suicide (another Code taboo) when she thinks she's lost him, but she's perfectly happy to wind up with him at the end of the movie. None of this is to suggest that Hungary was a better place to make movies at that time, of course. De Toth left it for Hollywood, where he became a second-tier director specializing in Westerns like The Gunfighter (1950) and films noir like Pitfall (1948) before moving into television; his best-known movie is House of Wax (1953), one of the first of the run of 3-D features in the 1950s. 

None Shall Escape (André De Toth, 1944)

Marsha Hunt and Alexander Knox in None Shall Escape

Cast: Alexander Knox, Marsha Hunt, Henry Travers, Erik Rolf, Richard Crane, Dorothy Morris, Richard Hale, Ruth Nelson, Kurt Krueger, Shirley Mills, Elvin Field, Trevor Bardette, Frank Jaquet, Ray Teal. Screenplay: Lester Cole, Alfred Neumann, Joseph Than. Cinematography: Lee Garmes. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Ernst Toch. 

By imagining the trial of a Nazi officer for war crimes a year or so before the war actually ended, André De Toth's None Shall Escape took a risk of seeming dated once Germany was defeated and the exposure of the real atrocities committed during the Third Reich would be known. But it's an honorable effort, a gripping portrayal of what can happen when a person with grudges to nurse takes power and can enact revenge. It mostly steers away from Hollywood-style sentimentality in its depiction of the victims of Nazism. 

Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948)

Lizabeth Scott and Dick Powell in Pitfall

John Forbes: Dick Powell
Mona Stevens: Lizabeth Scott
Sue Forbes: Jane Wyatt
J.B. MacDonald: Raymond Burr
Bill Smiley: Byron Barr
District Attorney: John Litel
Tommy Forbes: Jimmy Hunt
Ed Brawley: Selmer Jackson

Director: André De Toth
Screenplay: Karl Kamb
Based on a novel by Jay Dratler
Cinematography: Harry J. Wild
Art direction: Arthur Lonergan
Film editing: Walter Thompson
Music: Louis Forbes

André De Toth's Pitfall is a noir-tinged cautionary fable about midlife ennui. Married to his childhood sweetheart, Sue, John Forbes is bored with his job at an insurance company and with his suburban life in general. But then he gets a case involving the recovery of the assets of Bill Smiley, who is doing time for embezzlement. The sleazy private eye Forbes has hired, J.B. MacDonald, has tracked down some of the loot to Smiley's mistress, Mona Stevens. Forbes decides to pay her a visit, but not before MacDonald, with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, urges him to put in a good word with Mona about him. Forbes's visit to Mona will turn into an affair that earns the enmity of not only MacDonald, who is obsessed with her, but also Smiley, whose jail term is almost up. The whole thing ends with a couple of corpses and a badly damaged marriage. De Toth handles it with a minimum of sugarcoating on the life of the Forbeses, even though they have a cute little boy named Tommy, and with a great deal of suspense as the hulking MacDonald, well-played by Raymond Burr in his heaviest heavy mode, gets Forbes more deeply involved in his relationship with Mona -- despite the best efforts of both Forbes and Mona to put an end to it.