The Story of Vickie is not intended to faithfully depict the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign. Marischka’s main aim – and that of Sil-Vara before him – is to entertain the audience, to move them and to make them dream with a classic love story.
Although we all remember him for having directed the trilogy dedicated to the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Ernst Marischka, to this day one of the most important names in Austrian film history, boasts a career spanning several decades, in which his directing career was complemented by those of screenwriter, librettist and film producer.
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.
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.