Borzage adds a prologue, and makes Nemecsek die not in bed but on the ‘field’ of battle (…). It is as a result of this eminently pacifistic intention that Molnar’s story undergoes two slight distortions. The aim of Borzage and Swerling is thus to demonstrate ‘the futility of war, whether conducted by adults or by children’. (….) But after the holocaust of 1914-1918, the war epic of the boys of Pest assumed an extra dimension, because it revealed nolens volens the mechanisms of manipulation which leads to conflict. (…) Initially the pedagogical interest of Molnàr’s novel was its illustration of the symptoms of adolescence. This was one of the most popular of Hungarian children’s books, translated into innumerable languages, transposed to the stage in 19 and adapted to the screen five times. “Borzage took his inspiration from another work by Ferenc Molnàr (Liliom), the novel The Boys from Pal Street ( A Pàl-utcai fiùk), published in Budapest in 1907.
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