Unable to make up his mind whether what he had in hand were the materials for comedy or tragedy, Tabori has managed [in The Emperor's Clothes] a hybrid that gets nowhere as either and that is further so muddled by a variety of writing styles that it seems to be the combined work of four or five different men, all of them with a different purpose in view and none of them in consultation with one another.
The story, laid in the dawning police state of Hungary and in 1930 Budapest in particular, has to do with a college professor out of a job for his political opinions who has taken up as a means of livelihood the translating of lurid American Wild West stories and with his small son who sees in him, despite his timidity and even cowardice, traces of the heroes that figure in the sensational tales. So great becomes the youngster's bragging and boasting of his father's imagined exploits that the police, unacquainted with the literature in question, take the old man into custody as a suspected revolutionary….
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