Mephisto

Mephisto follows Hendrik Höfgen, a stage actor in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s who is driven by a fierce hunger for recognition. Tired of light entertainment and drawn to more demanding work, he wins fame through his performance as Mephistopheles in a Faust production. When the Nazis take power, his friends and colleagues either leave the country or are crushed by the regime, while Höfgen stays and accommodates himself to the new order. The role that made him admired gradually swallows his own identity, until holding up appearances for his Nazi patrons becomes the performance he cannot end.

István Szabó directed the film, working from a screenplay he wrote with Péter Dobai, and Manfred Durniok produced it. It came roughly midway through the director's career, fourteen years after his first feature and fifteen years before Offenbach's Secret. Klaus Maria Brandauer plays Höfgen, with Krystyna Janda, Ildikó Bánsági, Rolf Hoppe, Karin Boyd and György Cserhalmi among the twenty-three credited cast members. A German, Austrian and Hungarian production running 145 minutes, it draws on the Faust legend and the compromises of artistic life under dictatorship.

Audiences rate the film solidly: 7.7 out of 10 on IMDb from around 12,000 votes, and 7.3 out of 10 on TMDB, where the vote count is far smaller. The critics' rating of 7.7 out of 10, based on 25 reviews, sits level with the much larger IMDb sample, indicating that professional and general assessments of the film largely coincide.