Hollywood, Aliens, And A Christmas Story - Modern Pop Culture Images Of Hungarians in the US

“They’re heeeeerrrrreeeeee…”: Alien-(n)ation.

One of the maximum enduring and entertaining snap shots of Hungarians for the duration of the second 1/2 of the 20th century is the idea of Hungarians as extraterrestrial beings or Martians. Much of that is tongue-in-cheek, isn't always intended to be pejorative, and has been exploited to true impact and with extremely good enjoyment via Hungarians themselves - to the point in their probable having been in the back of its origination. There are more than one overlapping/competing descriptions of how all this started. Consensus shows that it got here out of the circles of émigré nuclear scientists, physicists, and mathematicians who got here to the USA for the duration of Nineteen Thirties and 1940s, a lot of whom had been collocated at Los Alamos, New Mexico for the Manhattan Project.

As George Marx, a Hungarian professor of atomic physics in Budapest, asks in his extraordinarily engaging bankruptcy entitled “The Martians’ Vision of the Future,” how is it that there were companies of Austrians, Germans, and Italians worried in those clinical breakthroughs and yet it was Hungarians on my own who seemed to gain the moniker and association of “alien?” Marx appears to pick the account according to which sooner or later the Italian Enrico Fermi turned into speculating approximately the universe and the opportunity of life on different planets, and Leo Szilard, a Hungarian, ventured a solution to Fermi’s question:

“And so,” Fermi came to his overwhelming question, “if all this has been happening, they ought to have arrived here via now, so in which are they?” It changed into Leo Szilard, a person with an impish sense of humor, who provided the suitable reply to Fermi's rhetoric: “They are amongst us,” he stated, “but they name themselves Hungarians.” (in line with Marx, this is Francis Crick’s model of the parable)

Marx elaborates at the “birth to a legend”:

The fantasy of the Martian beginning of the Hungarian scientists who entered international history on American soil at some stage in World War II probable originated in Los Alamos. Leon Lederman, director of the Fermilab, suggested viable hidden intentions. The production of scientists and mathematicians within the early 20th century was so prolific that many in any other case calm observers believe Budapest changed into settled with the aid of Martians in a plan to infiltrate and take over the planet Earth…According to myth, at a top mystery assembly of the Manhattan Project, General Groves left for the gentlemen' room. Szilard then stated: “Perhaps we may additionally now maintain in Hungarian!” Hungarian émigrés enjoyed speakme their mother tongue on every occasion a risk supplied itself. This has made them appearance suspicious. Los Alamos was a place of pinnacle security. General Groves became irritated that Neumann and Wigner had common phone conversations in Hungarian. [Teller, talk in Budapest 1991.] The “thick Hungarian accessory” changed into often heard even inside the corridors of the Pentagon. (The Lugosi accent made the alien electricity of Dracula, the depend from the remote Transylvania even greater practical.)

Marx recounts the info of the arrival of the Martians-cum-Hungarians on planet Earth:

--Gabor, von Kármán, Kemeny, von Neumann, Szilard, Teller, and Wigner have been born in the same sector of Budapest [author’s note—most were Jewish…it is interesting to note that some anti-Semitic Hungarian nationalists at the same time assiduously include these names in lists of famous Hungarians]. No marvel the scientists in Los Alamos customary the concept that nicely over 1000 years in the past a Martian spaceship crashlanded someplace within the middle of Europe. There are three company proofs of the extraterrestrial origins of the Hungarians: they prefer to wander approximately (like gypsies radiating out from the equal location). They speak a really easy and logical language which has not the slightest connection with the language of their pals. And they're a lot smarter than the terrestrials. (In a moderate Martian accent John G. Kemeny brought an explanation, particularly, that it's so tons easier to examine reading and writing in Hungarian than in English or French, that Hungarian children have a good deal greater time left to take a look at mathematics.) [quoted by Marx from “Yankee” Magazine (?) 1980] ([http://www.Mek.Iif.Hu/kiallit/tudtor/tudos1/martians.Html])

Finally, in a somewhat more extreme vein, the alien connotation has been explained in analytical terms as follows:

If we apprehend SteeDee's principle correctly, the primary Hungarians-
are-aliens tale arose from a few minor human incident. The
Hungarians may also have stood out from the rest of the personnel at Los
Alamos, possibly through maintaining their very own cliques and speaking
their own indecipherable tongue, and this made the English
speakers uncomfortable. The Hungarians were like extraterrestrial beings to the
relaxation, and on the grounds that there were many reports of "unidentified flying object" within the
popular press in the 50s and late 40s, the "Martian" label was a
convenient manner to sublimate the social tensions. To be referred to as
extraterrestrials, in a jocular, rib-poking manner, would possibly have helped
lessen this social friction each outside and inside the Hungarian
organization. If there was a trouble with verbal exchange, the recurring
alien shaggy dog story could offer a means to make mild of it, thereby
expressing frustrations that could not in any other case be spoken. (http://www.Ufomind.Com/area51/desertrat/1995/dr29/ )

According to Marx, “as a depend of truth, these suspicious Hungarians—Theodore von Kármán, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard—enjoyed the parable. Edward Teller became in particular satisfied of his E.T. Initials, however he complained about indiscretion, ‘Von Kármán ought to were speaking’.”

From Teller to Talleah…Zsa Zsa and Her Sisters

This brings us from Teller to Talleah, the difference being that Teller became a real Hungarian scientist who pretended to play the a part of an alien…whereas Talleah is the call of an alien from the 1958 King of the B Sci-fi Movies, “Queen of Outer Space”…starring none apart from perhaps the maximum famous Hungarian amongst Americans, Zsa Zsa Gabor, who plays the function of an alien scientist! [More about this hysterical film and its hysterical reviews below.]

Of direction, June 1989 placed Hungarians on the map for plenty Americans. The reburial of Imre Nagy, the large crowds, the solemn ceremony earlier than masses of heaps and a live television target audience, a landmark occasion within the records of Hungary…No, that turned into sixteen June 1989…I am referring right here to fourteen June 1989, the day Zsa Zsa slapped a Beverly Hills police officer, an incident that right now have become fodder for each late night time comedian or even two years later changed into the concern of a spoof starring the actress inside the satirical film collection, the Naked Gun. Such is the fate of Hungary and Hungarians within the United States.

There have been truly three Gabor sisters: Zsa Zsa, Eva, and Magda. I am now not certain whether to say marriage or divorce ran within the family. The 3 sisters had greater marriages than they did important movie roles. To borrow a web page from Dave Barry in another context (Dave Barry Slept Here, Random House 1989, p. 101), right here are the final tallies of the three sisters in Marriages:

Final (?) Gabor Sister Marriage Standings

Zsa Zsa 9* *** ****

Magda 6**

Eva five

*It is hard to realize how exactly to calculate Zsa Zsa’s overall number of husbands…considering that as she as soon as responded: “How many husbands have I had? You mean aside from my own?”

**These numbers may be suffering from the fact that both Zsa Zsa and Magda had been married to the English actor George Sanders, if sixteen years aside. Not to make too much mild of factors, but Sanders in the end dedicated suicide. He performed the part of Mr. Freeze inside the Batman tv collection, that Zsa Zsa made guest appearances on (see beneath).

***It appeared handiest fitting in early 2007 surrounding the macabre and absurd Anna Nicole Smith custody fight that Zsa Zsa’s most current husband—Prinz von Anhalt—claimed that he had a ten year affair with Anna Nicole and was the father of her orphaned baby. (Supposedly, Zsa Zsa changed into angered and harm by way of this admission, however can one absolutely bargain the possibility that it become but some other strive for Zsa Zsa to get again inside the limelight, and after all, hadn’t Anna Nicole Smith been famous for being well-known.)

****It may surprise almost no person in a positive sense, but Zsa Zsa’s daughter via Conrad Hilton (the best baby of all three Gabor sisters) is grand-aunt to Paris and Nicole Hilton.

Zsa Zsa claims that she gained the 1936 Hungarian beauty festival (in step with one Hungarian supply, Sandor Incze who located Zsa Zsa, invented the concept of the splendor competition…don’t think so), despite the fact that her mom Jolie (“pretty” in French), married most effective two times, and fond of “new math” lengthy earlier than we knew it was new—like her daughters she seemed genetically incapable of telling her real age; if she became telling the fact her first daughter, Magda, would had been born when Jolie turned into thirteen!—claimed it turned into she (the mom) and no longer Zsa Zsa who had gained the splendor festival. (To use the famous Casey Stengel line “You can look it up!”…these items must be verifiable, despite the fact that I will go away that to others to analyze when you consider that it is past the supposed scope of this paper.)

The “Queen of Outer Space” or “Damn it, Jim, I’m a Former Hungarian Beauty Queen, Not a(n Alien) Scientist”

Zsa Zsa’s film career is summarized by the web film critic “Jabootu” as follows:

Unfortunately, Ms. Gabor’s Hollywood profession proved lots much less epic [than her married life or run-ins with the law]. In John Huston’s 1952 Moulin Rouge, Zsa Zsa played, in a formidable pass, a Euro-sexpot opposite Jose Ferrer’s Toulouse-Lautrec. The following yr she appeared in a helping role within the musical Lili, which co-starred the unrelated however similarly monikered Mel Ferrer. From there, though, it became all downhill. Her few starring roles included gambling twins (!!) inside the hilarious-sounding espionage meller Girl inside the Kremlin. In case you’re wondering, one of the twins [is] Stalin’s mistress (!!), the alternative a secret agent operating towards the Soviets. Zsa Zsa additionally had a bit element in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. (http://www.Jabootu.Com/queen.Htm)

But perhaps “Jabootu” is being too hasty and superficial in judging Ms. Gabor’s profession. Maybe we have underestimated Zsa Zsa’s roles in movie and television. For example, Zsa Zsa has acknowledged how she liked playing the function of “secret agent” whilst she guest-starred at the Batman serial as Minerva, a splendor parlor proprietor, whose hairdryers could examine the minds of (male) customers. Was the episode perhaps a skillful allegory approximately how the totalitarian kingdom makes use of the maximum banal and subversive approach to pry into the lives of its residents? (Was the “mullet” a communist plot to make Americans look silly? Tune in next time, identical Battime, equal Batchannel…)

Evidence for any such, extra enlightened, revisionist view comes from the 1958 film “Queen of Outer Space,” in which Zsa Zsa plays Talleah, an alien scientist, who leads the girls of Venus towards the sadistic, disfigured Queen Yllana, thereby saving a flight team of fellows from Earth whom Yllana has cruelly imprisoned. I argue here that this movie best seems to be a sexist, cheesy, and moronic automobile for profit, when in reality this is a part of its subterfuge and inner-brilliance. The film is, in reality, a diffused and sophisticated allegory of communist Hungary and the outbreak and crushing of the 1956 Hungarian rebellion. Let us take another study this film—although, alas, we're forced to depend upon the flippant and sometimes juvenile comments of “Jabootu” for a dialogue of the plot.

In this first prolonged excerpt, we find Zsa Zsa’s Talleah (symbolizing the Hungarian resistance) being knowledgeable that currently arrived Earthmen (“bourgeois” intellectuals, “guys” were banished from the planet, although “scientists and mathematicians” had been retained because they had been wished) were imprisoned by using the evil Yllana (the communists/Soviets). Talleah recounts for the guys, the unhappy records of the planet, the adverse conflict, how Yllana went from nicely-which means rebellion to tyrant, and so on. The astute reader will notice here that Zsa Zsa is in fact recounting the destruction of World War II in Hungary—she says “Ten Earth years in the past”!—the approaching to power of the communists, the preliminary “popular” picture of the Soviets as liberators, and their creation of a human beings’s dictatorship….

“To Be Hungarian Is Not Enough…”: Hollywood and Hungarians

As is to be expected of area vacationers, Hungarians claim to have based positive places…certainly one of them being Hollywood. Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures, one of the early Hungarians in Hollywood is said to have had on the wall of his office an inscription: “TO BE A HUNGARIAN IS NOT ENOUGH.” To this George Marx adds, “in a low voice Adolph could upload, ‘but it can assist’.” He continues, “Non-Hungarians in Hollywood used to say, “If you have a Hungarian friend, you don't need an enemy.” The MGM commissary become stated to have a sign which examine, “Just due to the fact you’re Hungarian, doesn’t suggest you’re a genius!”

The affect of Hungarians on Hollywood is astounding. In 1996, the Associated Press stated that of the 136 Oscar nominations considering 1929, Hungarians had won 30 of them. Some of the names are extra acquainted than others. George Cukor—not to be pressured with the aforementioned Adolph Zukor, “Mr. Motion Pictures,” founding father of Paramount Pictures, and producer of perhaps the first film “Prisoner of Zenda”—captured five great director nominations, inclusive of for My Fair Lady (’Enry ’Iggins says of Zoltan Karpathy: “Every time we looked round there he become that furry hound from Budapest. Never leaving us by myself, by no means have I ever recognised a ruder pest.”). William Fox of “20th Century Fox” become born near Tokaj, Hungary, famous for its sweet wines. Among the better-recognized actors aside from Bela Lugosi (born Bela Blasko) and the Gabor clan, we will name Leslie Howard, born Laszlo Steiner, and Tony Curtis, born Bernard Schwartz (born in Budapest, fluent in Hungarian), and Peter Lorre.

Speaking of Bela Lugosi…there may be the subsequent unforgettable change among Johnny Depp playing mythical B-moviemaker Ed Wood and Martin Landau (himself of interplanetary space journey often) in his Oscar-triumphing portrayal of getting old, foul-mouthed, bitter, and morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” (1994):

[Ed and Bela are watching Vampira's TV show.]
Ed Wood: Oh, I hate it whilst she interrupts the picture. She does not display 'em the proper appreciate.
Bela Lugosi: I think she's a honey. Look at the ones jugs!
[Bela Lugosi casts a love spell on Vampira who is on TV while moving his fingers like Dracula]
Edward D. Wood, Jr.: My Gosh, Bela, how do you do that?
Bela Lugosi: You must be double-jointed. And you must be Hungarian. [!]

Some “Hungarians” well-known in movie and television will come as a surprise. Drew Barrymore’s mom was Ildiko Jaid Mako. Jerry Seinfeld might speak approximately Ceausescu above, but his father turned into named Kalman Seinfeld. Paul Newman’s mother became Hungarian. And half of the famed animator set at the back of “The Simpsons” and a series of other cartoons, Klasky Csupo—Gabor Csupo—is a Hungarian (he fled Hungary in 1975 trekking thru a 2 ½ hours via a darkened railway tunnel to Austria).

The minutiae of some of these cases is to mention the least interesting. Other extremely good reveals on the webenetics site are the following. Ilona Staller, aka Ciccolina, of blue movies and green politics, had a purple father—a member of the early communist Interior Ministry. And Juan Epstein’s mother—whose signature concluded each excuse be aware Juan Epstein added to class within the Seventies ABC sitcom “Welcome again, Kotter!”—is in truth Hungarian, Juan Epstein having been played with the aid of Robert Hegyes.

“What’s that? Hungarian roots?”: Budapest and Wanting the Other MTV

Then there are the Hungarian roots of rock and pa stars. Appropriately enough, even as Art Garfunkel is of Romanian Jewish ancestry, Paul Simon is of Hungarian Jewish ancestry. Tommy Ramone, drummer for “The Ramones,” turned into born with the more sedate name of Thomas Erdelyi. We can salute Gene Simmons of KISS (or should it have been KISz?) as half-Hungarian, and you might locate it ironic, but you must recognize that Alanis Morissette is supposedly half of Hungarian. It additionally seems that the father of the Knopfler brothers of the “Dire Straits” band turned into a Hungarian Jew who fled the Nazis to Glasgow in 1939.

The Hungarian tie of “Dire Straits” is exciting—although probable completely incidental—in light of the “video within a video” of the band’s maximum well-known industrial/video success, “Money for Nothing (1985).” “Money for Nothing” is better regarded for its line “I want my MTV”—extremely good and relatively satirical advertising and marketing, point out the video channel coming of age in an iconic way to your song/video and you will assure play there. (It changed into also the primary video played while MTV Europe debuted on 1 August 1987—for the ones too younger to recall, MTV, no now not Magyar Televizio, changed into a quick experiment in playing some thing called “music motion pictures” till fact suggests killed the song video famous person). The premise, the foundation of “Money for Nothing,” became a bunch of people transferring home equipment and commenting at the same time as, as it turns outs, watching Sting’s “The Russians” video on a wall of TV monitors. (Ooohhhh, Sting noted the Russians, do they honestly love their youngsters too? Ooooohhhhh, how daring…due to the fact I’m positive the Russians do love their kids too…1985, the eighties, ugh). I had always wondered approximately “the video inside the video” since the bikini-clad “mama she got it stickin’ inside the digital camera lens” model appears to be posing inside the Halaszbastya (Fisherman’s Bastion at the Buda side of Budapest) which I had then just these days visited (May 1985, the video got here out in September 1985). Turns out I wasn’t hallucinating for as Dennis O’Connell writes:

The video changed into produced by means of Steve Barron, who expected that the complete video be pc lively. The band wanted a stay video. The final product become a mixture: photos from Budapest enhanced by computers at the side of a laptop generated person, Sal, which became inspired by using Joe Pesci's person in Raging Bull.

Sting, the object of the employees’ derision that gave upward thrust to the tune, performs returned up vocals on “Money for Nothing.” Bringing the whole thing complete circle, my Russian History professor in university determined to open his semester with “Money for Nothing” blaring as college students entered the school room.

Camp. La(s)zlo

In keeping with the alien riff, Hungarians love their inside jokes. The crowd-favorite, sentimentalist Hollywood film, “Casablanca,” with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman (nope, neither of them Hungarian), became directed through Michael Curtiz (Kertesz). S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall, a Hungarian level actor, performed the function of Karl, the kindly Austrian waiter in Rick’s Café. The well-known historian John Lukacs (author of Budapest 1900) amongst others has argued that there is a standard Hungarian interior comic story in this film—or at the least the movie bears the marks of its Hungarian director. Ingrid Bergman’s underground, Czech resistance leader husband within the film is known as Victor Laszlo. Now, of direction, as Lukacs notes—individually, he describes the film as “imbecile”—“Laszlo” is neither a primary nor final name in Czech. It is, however a now and again final name, however common first-name in Hungarian—and Curtiz became surrounded “by using a slew of Hungarian scriptwriters in Hollywood, a lot of whose first names were Laszlo” (Lukacs, 1989, pp. 178-179). Hence, the call within the movie. (There is also a famous cutting-edge cool animated film named “Camp Lazlo,” but Lazlo is a Brazilian spider monkey, and as far as I can tell there may be in no aware Hungarian connection at the back of the call preference.)

But I would argue there are even higher inner Hungarian jokes than that of “Victor Laszlo” woven into movies, as I will now show.

The Boy Named Wolf in Hungarian Who Made Ralphie Cry…

It took over 30,000 toes, numerous time area adjustments, and countless years to discern it out. A few years in the past (2001) I become flying out west and scanning the track channels for the headphones. On the classical track channel I abruptly came upon a familiar song. Yes, there it become: the tune that might repeat on every occasion the school bully could seem in the lovely, sentimental, nostalgia-fest for a life that few people ever lived, this is “A Christmas Story (1983).” I concept I diagnosed the music: it was Sergei Prokofiev’s well-known “Peter and the Wolf,” and the topic—that which Prokofiev used for the wolf—became the college bully’s signature in the movie. Upon the primary hearing of this tune, while the college bully makes his first scary look, the reminiscing “Ralphie,” the little boy who is the primary protagonist of the film, exclaims, “it changed into Farkas, Scott Farkas, the school bully…he had yellow eyes, yellow eyes I let you know.” (Ralphie’s more youthful brother, Randy “lay there like a slug…it turned into his most effective protection”!)

(Spoiler Warning!: When I came to this non-public epiphany in 2001, or even at the same time as I turned into writing this newsletter in 2005, there has been no indication on the Internet that every body else had recorded this statement, which led me to impeach whether or not an overactive creativeness had gotten the quality of me another time. What a excellent distinction two years can be inside the Internet age: now a Google search for “farkas wolf ‘christmas story’ prokofiev” yields 123 hits, starting with the wikipedia access for the film!)

Why is that this critical you ask? Well, if you realize Hungarian, you'll know that “farkas” is the Hungarian word for “wolf.” Therefore, to play the subject of the “wolf” from Prokofiev’s work—a piece drafted, it might seem, for youngsters to learn the diverse devices of an orchestra—is to play an difficult to understand “interior funny story” on the visitors of the movie. (Making it even better is the fact that the actor who performs the a part of Ralphie is Peter! Billingsley.) Jean Shepherd, upon whose book the film is based totally—and who also narrates the movie from the perspective of an person Ralphie searching lower back on his childhood—appears to have chosen the name of the bully, “Scott (Scut) Farkas,” himself. The tale is ready in 1940s northwestern Indiana—substantially, Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” debuted in 1936 and have become the challenge of a Disney cartoon—so the presence of people of Hungarian ancestry and final names is potential.

It is usually viable that the Prokofiev-wolf-farkas nexus is just an unintentional, if very witty happenstance. But the concept of it having been one of the closing Hungarian “internal jokes”—despite the fact that Jean Shepherd does no longer appear to have been Hungarian himself—is greater via the relatively unknown and virtually much less memorable sequel to “A Christmas Story,” “It Runs in the Family (1994),” wherein Ralphie’s father recounts the tale of “the Hungarian barber’s pass-eyed daughter.” Shepherd died in 1999, however as with many not unusual last names from different cultures—and farkas can possibly be deemed one of those—developing up with Hungarian friends it's far conceivable that Shepherd could have regarded the which means of the call in Hungarian.

“Honky”: The Hungarian Roots of a Racial Epithet

Speaking of the Hungarian(-American) “running class” inside the Chicago environs. According to the access at the wikipedia: Honky, Honkey or Honkie is an American racial slur for a Caucasian, normally implemented to adult males. The phrase “honky” as a pejorative for Caucasians comes from "bohunk" and "hunky". In the early 1900’s, those were derogatory phrases for Bohemian, Hungarian, and Polish immigrants. According to Robert Hendrickson, author of the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, Black employees in Chicago meat-packing flowers picked up the term from white people and commenced applying it indiscriminately to all Caucasians.

Honky, changed into later adopted as a pejorative that means white, in 1967 by means of black militants within SNCC seeking a rebuttal for the time period nigger. They settled on a acquainted phrase they felt turned into disparaging to sure Americans of European descent; hunkie which means an American of Slavic or Hungarian descent.

In the Simpsons cool animated film series, Homer Simpson is keen on saying while something goes wrong, especially at the nuclear energy plant where he works, “blame it on Tibor, the fellow who doesn’t talk English.” One can believe that this is some thing of an interior comic story many of the creators of the Simpsons, because the chief cartoonist Gabor Csupo is Hungarian (supposedly Hank Azaria’s person Dr. Nick Riviera, a quack medical doctor, is meant to be a parody of Ricky Ricardo on “I Love Lucy”—“Hi e-ver-y-bo-dy!”—however coworkers simply assumed he turned into making fun of Gabor. Personally, I even have constantly idea he sounds oddly like Andrei Codrescu on NPR…) According to the web urban dictionary of slang, “blame it on…Tibor” has entered at the least some marginal famous discourse as shorthand for blaming the foreigner—for that reason in keeping possibly, by accident, with the roots of “Honky”:

A tibor is someone on your workplace whom you blame when you have accomplished some thing silly, unlawful, or immoral. Typically the individual is someone who cannot defend themself. Especially powerful when the Tibor can not talk English. “You'll need to jiggle the manage. That fool, Tibor, misplaced the key.”