mad about love
By Douglas Messerli
Joseph
Kessel and Irma von Cube (screenplay, based on the book by Claude Anet), Anatole Litvak (director) Mayerling 1936
Even then, Rudolf still gets
arrested along with a group of student demonstrators and continues meeting with
his leftist editor friend, Szeps (René Bergeron). Even more importantly, an
accidental encounter with a beautiful young woman, Marie Vetsera (Danielle
Darrieux), in the Prather leads to an intense and, this film would have you
believe, chaste love affair that ends, after Rudolf’s father Emperor Franz
Joseph (Jean Dax) threatens to send the 17-year old girl to a convent, with a
double suicide.
Then how do you extend this
well-known tragic love affair into an hour and a half movie? Call in
Russian-born German and Paris-based director Anatole Litvak and provide him
with a large enough budget that he can twist the simple story around grand
palace balls, an abridged two-act ballet, an astounding athletic gypsy dance,
that’s what you do. Litvak brilliantly dollies and cranes his camera up and
down grand staircases, and follows the stories’ secret spies throughout Vienna
with all the pomp and music of the day.
When
Litvak’s camera is done with moving around in the grand sweeps of the costume
drama, he scurries about with gossipy facilitation of the affair by Countess
Larisch (Suzy Prim), Marie’s Nanny, and Rudolph’s loyal valet, Loschek (Andre
Dubosc). And finally, for long periods of time he simply lets his hero and
heroine to sorrowfully stare into the camera focusing on their beautifully expressive
eyes.
No matter
how corny these scenes might be on the surface, given the wonderful costumes,
music, and credible acting by both Boyer and Darrieux, it all works quite
gloriously, even if there’s no “there” there in terms of story or even significance,
and ultimately, after a few grimaces and, if you’re very sentimental, a
tear-drop or two, Mayerling leaves
the viewer with very little remember except some pretty images and the
excellent dancing.
If Litvak
weighs in with any political commentary about the couple’s doomed love, it is
in the film’s muted criticism of the Hapsburg dynasty’s inflexibility with
regard to its notions of power and familial responsibility. Rudolf’s mother,
the unhappy Elisabeth, was later assassinated in Greece, and Rudolf’s death
resulted in the crowning of his cousin, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose own assassination
in 1914 resulted in World War I and the fall of the Hapsburg empire..
Los Angeles, August 2, 2015
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