'MAYERLING'-FRENCH CLASSIC

Evening Star, Issue 23699, 5 October 1940, Page 5

'MAYERLING'-FRENCH CLASSIC

Fifty years ago one winter morning the Vienna express was stopped at Baden. It was on January 30, 1889. and was an extraordinary chapter in the tragedy of the House of Hapsburg. The Crown Prince Rudolph Francis Charles Joseph, Archduke of Austria, had been found dead in a hunting lodge at Mayerling. The lodge was on the edge of the Vienna Woods, and its chimneys showed through clumps of fir and oak.

To-day it is a Carmelite convent, and a chapel takes the place of the room in which the bodies of Rudolph ami the Baroness Marie Vetsera were discovered. Suicide was the official verdict, but the murder theory has been discussed.

Rudolph was handsome, aetiveminded, bored by Court life, not enchanted with the role of idolised bento the throne. At 31 he had exhausted all the pleasures of the Court. Then he fell in love with the young Marie Vetsera, a debutante of 17, who died beside him.

* Mayerling,’ the film (produced by Vero Film, Paris), presents the story of the unhappy lovers, and critics overseas declare that when you see this picture you are in a position to judge the talents of Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux. The delicacy of the French direction brings out all the lights and shades. Darrieux is described as presenting an exquisite girl of 17, and Boyer as master of the complex character of Rudolph. They say that in the Vienna Woods to-day ghosts walk. One is a lovely and trusting girl, who died that night, and beside her is the gallant figure of a prince whose country was destined for a tragedy much greater than his own. The ghosts have happily forgotten those shots in the night. They care nothing for the scandal, the theories, the lying-in-state of that winch was Rudolph in Vienna, the hurried burial of that which was Marie in a graveyard not far from the tragedy.

They remember a Vienna of splendour and gaiety which does not interest them so much, for their real affection is for the quiet lodge in the woods.

These are the people whom Boyer and Darrieux bring to live so compellingly in ‘ Mayerling,’ the Metropolitan Film, which opens shortly. ' Despite the fact that Mademoiselle Darrieux and Monsieur Boyer,. as well as the entire cast, speak only their native French tongue, ‘ Mayerling ’ will be completely understood by every person. Every word is clearly translated by superimposed English; while the love story of ‘ Mayerling ’ is so heartwarming, 'so perfectly enacted, that translation becomes superfluous.