Now emperor, now ruthless murderer on screen, generous benefactor in real life. Throughout his long and prolific career, Karlheinz Böhm did not only lend his face to Franz Joseph I of Austria. On the contrary, after the success of the Marischka trilogy, the actor tried throughout his life to distance himself from those films that had made him world-famous, often even playing characters that were decidedly antithetical to those he initially used to play.
Ernst Marischka in his interesting The House of three Girls seems extraordinarily able to combine humour and drama, prose and poetry, dance and music, without ever seeming artificial or banal, cleverly avoiding any rhetoric.
In the ensemble film Viennese Girls, director, painter and photographer Kurt Steinwendner – so fascinated by Italian Neorealism that he was inspired by it in every way – draws a fresco of a hardly recovering Vienna after World War II, in which what seems most difficult is to make ends meet, due to the job insecurity that sadly combines with the inhuman conditions of the workers.
The Angel with the Trumpet, the successful feature film by Karl Hartl from 1948 and freely adapted from the novel The Vienna Melody, written by Ernst Lothar in 1946, is a family saga and faithful portrait of around sixty years of Austrian history, which successfully mixes the two different points of view – that of Hartl himself, as well as the point of view from the original novel.
Third chapter of the successful saga directed by Ernst Marischka, Sissi – Fateful Years of an Empress has an even weaker personality than the unconvincing Sissi, the Young Empress. Following step by step the structure of the previous works, the film almost seems to us like a transitional film, especially if we think about the fact that it was supposed to be followed by a fourth feature film of the saga – to whose production Romy Schneider herself was strongly opposed.
In Sissi – The Young Empress, the difficulty of making the film a success is immediately evident, as if Ernst Marischka, living off his previous work, was struggling to pick up the thread of a discourse that had been interrupted at a point when a sequel was not even necessary.
Sissi, directed by Ernst Marischka, is a romantic comedy filmed in a pleasant and elegant way, clearly intended for an international distribution, in order to give the world a lively and joyful image of Austria and of what was, in its time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
