Pongrácz Erzsébet: The Cinemas of Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)

(Hungarian World) visited for a brief political téte-a-téte by prominent figures of Hungary’s cultural and political elite such as Gyula Justh or Géza Polónyi. During the First World War and the lean years in its wake the café was turned into a bank, but this later went bankrupt. In 1926 in place of the former bank building and to plans by Béla Jánszky and Tibor Szivessy, “growing out of the earth as it were by magic, the newest and most glamorous picture house of the capital, the Fórum, was erected. A dazzling red poster above its huge and richly ornamented entrance and a cataract of electric bulbs cascading in the manner of another Niagara Falls with metropolitan light over the life pulsating in Kossuth Lajos utca.... The most elegant theatre, the finest programme and the best orchestra: this treble slogan characterised the aspirations of.... this cinema - aspirations whose attainment, at whatever cost, has made the Forum truly the favourite forum of the Budapest public."

The Fórum was among the first, in the last moments of

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