MAYERLING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 15, 6 October 1939, Page 35

MAYERLING

(Metropolitan) What twenty years of peace couldn’t accomplish, the war now seems to have a chance of doing -bringing French films to this country and putting people in a frame of mind to appreciate them. The shortage of English product may quite easily result in the importation of some of the best French pictures which were produced before the war (whether any will be produced during and after it remains to be seen). Since patriotism and the Entente Cordiale would, in any case, demand that we should support these films, it is a matter for rejoicing that they are, in their own right as films, eminently worth supporting. In fact, for some years past the French have been making the best films.in the world. If a reputation like that could rest on one picture, it could comfortably rest on "Mayerling," which is due for early New Zealand release. The name of "Mayerling" may be vaguely familiar to film fans, who will possibly recall that Danielle Darrieux was mentioned as having already appeared in a French film of that title when Hollywood launched her on a waiting world in "The Rage of Paris." If "The Rage of Paris" were the only evidence available, the. world would still be waiting to see what all the fuss

was about; for Hollywood turned Mile. Darrieux into just another foreiga glamour girl, although rather more gifted than the average. Fortunately for us and for Mile. Darrieux, we now have a chance to see "Mayerling." There were, it must be admitted, moments in "The Rage of Paris" when the star showed signs of possessing a remarkable range of emotional expression; but it takes " Mayerling" to show us just how wide that range is, and how sincere and moving her acting can be. It takes " Mayerling " also to show us a Charles Boyer we have not previously known — though we have always admired what Hollywood has shown us of him. But here is Boyer at home in his own language, in a role that. might have been designed expressly for his sombre, introspective style of acting which, to me, somehow always conveys a sense of frustration and thwarted idealism. But above all it takes "Mayerling® to show us the difference between a French and a Hollywood production, " Mayerling" is the story of the famous affair of the Hapsburg hunting-lodge involving the mysterious deaths of the Archduke Rudolph of Austria and the 17-year-old Baroness Marie Vetsera. With such a theme of passion in high places, with such a setting in Old Vienna, it is not doing Hollywood an injustice to submit that the Americans would have turned it into an orgy of plush and plaster and Strauss waltzes, with battalions of extras in toy-soldier uniforms and those miles of corridors and opening doors which we remember so well from the Maurice Chevalier films. (Continued on next page)

FILM NOTES.

(Continued from previous page) That would be Hollywood: with the French it is different. They have given us some of the splendour of Old Vienna, but they have also given us the dirt. There is dust in the streets and on the imperial furnishings, and a griminess in human conduct which serves only to emphasise the purity and. serenity of the young Marie Vetsera. Rudolph, her

royal lover,.is no plaster saint, but a man of high passions and dark moodiness, until his grossness is burnt away in the crucible of suffering. Danielle Darrieux’s performance is ‘a. thing. of beauty; Boyer’s no less a thing of power. And by some genius of direction there is a cumulative effect of tragedy, growing from ‘simple details rather than from: deliberately contrived situations, which is. so, strong that, when the climax comes, it leaves you .almost stunned. But not unhappy, for the romance of " sera deinen 3 is as tender as it is powerful. " Mayerling" is the genuine article? That is to say, the dialogue is in French; the players, one might almost add, act in French. But don’t for that reason bother to blow the dust off your Gasc and brush up your French verbs, because there are English captions. Not that ‘they’re essential. The dialogue could be in Hindustani and we'd still understand this kind of acting and’ this kind of direction.