Karl Hartl has paid a wonderful tribute to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His Whom the Gods Love – recently restored by Filmarchiv Austria and presented to the audience on the Filmarchiv On channel – still has the remarkable ability to captivate us today, many years after its release, with all its visual and communicative power.
Thanks to its foresight and the grace and care with which it was made, Waltz Melodies is now considered a true gem of early cinema. A film that makes us think, but also gives us an hour and a half of laughter and light-heartedness.
Written and realised mainly for actor Hans Moser, My Daughter lives in Vienna is a brilliant comedy of errors that takes place predominantly in one location, but at the same time features a dynamic and well-thought-out direction.
Marika is a cheerful, lively and – also in a metaphorical sense – wonderfully colourful feature film. The first colour film in Austrian film history.
Annie Rosar took part in around a hundred films in her lifetime, and although she began working in the film industry as early as the silent era, with the invention of sound films, her career brought her even greater satisfaction, unlike that of many of her colleagues.
In We Invite You to a Dance, the typical Wiener Film elements are all there, and they make up an undoubtedly pleasant and well-written story, although extremely simple and with practically no subplots.
Particularly accurate in its settings and sufficiently attentive to the love torments of the two young protagonists, The Life and Loves of Mozart is distinguished by a direction that, however, would have needed more closeness to the characters themselves, in order to better render their internal conflicts derived from the difficult choices they have to make. In competition at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival.
Die Tat des Andreas Harmer is an extremely sophisticated noir, where – just as the great Fritz Lang had shown us in Metropolis in 1926 – the clear separation between good and evil is well represented on two levels by the settings, be they the basement of a building and the sewers of the city or a sunny park on a hot summer’s day.
The scene in which actors Hans Moser and Paul Hörbiger, dressed as bellhops, are struggling with the transport of some heavy luggage, including a big wooden box, is, to this day, considered one of the most famous sketches in the history of Austrian cinema. This is one of the highlight scenes of the comedy Hallo Dienstmann, directed by Franz Antel in 1951.