Pál Fejős (24 January 1897 – 23 April 1963), known professionally as Paul Fejos, was a Hungarian-American director of feature films and documentaries who worked in a number of countries including the United States.

During World War I, Fejos worked as a medical orderly for the Imperial Austrian Army on the Italian front lines and also managed a theater that performed for troops.

Like many film directors, Fejos exaggerated or invented myths for large portions of his life story and, according to him, his father was a captain with the Hussars and his mother was a Lady-in-waiting for the Austrian-Hungarian Empress.

World War I started soon afterward and Fejos worked as a medical orderly for the Imperial Austrian Army on the Italian front lines.

Some additional myths about Fejos' life surfaced a year later that he was an officer in the Hussars, was wounded three times and that he was the first person to pilot a combat airplane.

[3] As did prominent Hungarian filmmakers Michael Curtiz and Alexander Korda, Fejos left Hungary in 1923 to escape the White Terror and the Horthy regime.

He arrived in New York City penniless and speaking little English, but managed to get several low-paying jobs at funeral parlors and piano factories.

While living in New York, Fejos landed one theater gig as a technical adviser ensuring the Hungarian atmosphere of an adaptation of Ferenc Molnár's The Glass Slipper.

In the spring of 1926, Fejos spent his entire life savings of $45 on an old Buick to move to Los Angeles and pursue a Hollywood film career.

On one of his hitchhiking trips, Fejos was picked up by Edward Spitz, a rich, young New Yorker who had recently moved to Hollywood with ambitions to produce films.

It starred Otto Matieson as a man committing suicide by drowning who remembers in flashbacks the events of his life leading up to his death.

With the film's success and Fejos' overnight celebrity status, major studios were suddenly competing for the former vagrant to sign contracts with them.

[3] In 1928, Fejos quickly began production on his next and best-known film, Lonesome, from a script by Edward T. Lowe Jr. and Tom Reed based on a newspaper article about loneliness in modern American cities.

(After this first hastily accomplished phase, Universal continued using Fox's equipment to make its own first all-talking movie, Melody of Love - which is also the first-ever film musical - in under two week.

Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum praised Lonesome and compared Fejos to F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin.

Charles Higham stated that although "its visual style, initially attractive, becomes a monotonous succession of busy shots, dissolving over each other in a perpetual flurry...[but] the films charm is real.

Fejos was given a $1 million budget, most of which was spent on the huge cubist nightclub set and a 28-ton camera crane that was the largest and most versatile one built by that time.

Film critic Miles Krueger said "the images of the Paradise Club and the huge musical number (Final in Technicolor)" from Fejos' movie "have become basic screen literature.

"(I)f the movie theaters were suddenly closed in America, there would be a revolution", Fejos added, but that, in Europe, he hoped for "films made in the name of art".

Unlike the determinism of Murnau's compositions and camera movements, though, Fejos' anthropological distance and fairy-tale encapsulations imply a different sort of relationship to his characters.

The rapid cutting between details in a brothel, conveying Marie's confusion before fainting, encourages an identification with sensations, not thoughts or feelings.

The beauty of Annabella's performance and a violin-and-clarinet theme also help one overlook some of the more reductive aspects of the folk legend that define the films dimensions.

Having fallen in love with Annabella, Fejos allegedly flew in a small plane over her train back to France and showered it with roses.

Fejos spent the next few years throughout different European countries, often with his frequent collaborators Lothar Wolff, his assistant director, and Ferenc Farkas, his composer.

1), a farce in 1935 about a world where there are no prisoners or police officers; and The Golden Smile (Det Gyldne Smil), an adaptation in 1935 of playwright Kaj Munk's story about the relationship between art and life.

Upon Fejos' return to Denmark, Svensk Filmindustri's Gunnar Skoglund saw the Madagascar footage and commissioned a series of six short documentaries released between 1935 and 1936.

These films included Black Horizons (Svarta Horisonter), The Dancers of Esira, Beauty Salon in the Jungle, The Most Useful Tree in the World, Sea Devil and The Graves of our Father.

[3] In 1936, Fejos married Inga Arvad, a Danish journalist noted both for being a guest of Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Summer Olympics and for a romantic relationship with John F. Kennedy.

Svensk Filmindustri then commissioned Fejos to make a series of ethnographic films from 1937 to 1938 in such countries as Indonesia, the Philippines, New Guinea, Ceylon and Thailand.

These movies included A Handful of Rice (En Handfull Ris), Man and Woman (Man och Kvinna), The Tribe Still Lives (Stammen lever än), The Bamboo Age of Mentawei (Bambuåldern på Mentawei), The Chief's Son is Dead (Hövdingens son är död), The Komodo Dragon (Draken på Komodo) and The Village Near Pleasant Fountain (Byn vid den trivsamma brunnen).