But Franz Ferdinand’s stepmother, the Archduchess Maria Teresa (Gabrielle Dorziat), in another exquisite Ophülsian touch, masks her big-hearted energy and her behind-the-scenes power with an air of distracted leisure and tries-with the Mayerling tragedy in mind-to keep the couple together. In the movie, Franz Joseph (played by Jean Worms), reacts with irritation at Franz Ferdinand’s political plans, and with fury at the Crown Prince’s incipient efforts to realize them, and he dispatches his heir on what is, in effect, a boredom-tour of insignificant but grandly public official rounds throughout the Empire.īut, of course, the empire isn’t known for its love matches the marriages of princes are affairs of state, arranged for diplomatic rather than romantic purposes, and Franz Joseph, finding his heir’s choice unworthy of him and the regime, does his best to separate the tenderly giddy couple. Franz Ferdinand (who, of course, became its epochal victim) saw these centrifugal forces threatening the Empire, and sought to reconfigure it as the United States of Austria. The Austro-Hungarian Empire ham-handedly exerted its dominion over the peoples of Central and Southeastern Europe, giving rise to nationalist opposition. Here’s where the background to the thumb-nail high-school history kicks in. The Crown Prince, however (played by the American actor John Lodge, who later served in Congress and, in 1950, was elected governor of Connecticut) shows up unannounced-upsetting the Emperor with this breach of protocol-and discloses his own political plans. His story about romance unfolds the essence of romanticism his tale of Austrian nobles reveals the essence of nobility.įrom the start, the movie is a show of shows: it’s set in the imperial palace in Vienna, where members of Franz Joseph’s staff are fussing over and acting out the seating arrangement for that evening’s state dinner while the Emperor’s arrogant and officious right-hand man, Montenuovo (played by Aimé Clariond), issues a phony press release about the absence of the Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, who is ill and recuperating in Egypt. He films spectacular pageantry with an eye to what it conceals, sees surfaces as inseparable from the depths below, and so, captures the historical implications of seemingly trivial intimate gestures. Ophüls (as I discuss here, regarding his 1948 drama “Letter from an Unknown Woman,” which also has a Viennese setting), is a cinematic philosopher of appearances. Ophüls’s film is indeed a love story, and a grand one-the story of another thwarted romance that shook the throne-but it’s also an expressly political story as well as a vision of monarchic rule. On the face of it, hinting that Germany was once again rampaging through Europe because of Hitler’s screwed-up love life would be the height of decadence and frivolity. Ophüls, who was German and Jewish, escaped to France when Hitler took power, and he made “From Mayerling to Sarajevo” as another war was beginning in Europe. The sublimity of the notion is precisely in its audacity-and in the risk of being misunderstood. The woman in question is the Countess Sophie Chotek, a minor Czech aristocrat whom he married against the wishes of the Emperor, Franz Joseph. The idea of the film is profound and simple: to unfurl the series of events that brought Franz Ferdinand to Sarajevo on the fateful day in 1914_, cherchez la femme_. Ophüls’s film, even unseen, points to the origins of war in romance, to the roots of politics in personal relationships. Rudolf’s death promoted Franz Joseph’s brother, Karl Ludwig, and then his nephew, Franz Ferdinand, to Crown Prince. The Mayerling incident, of 1889, was the double suicide (or murder-suicide) of the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf and his seventeen-year-old lover, Mary Vetsera, whose relationship was fiercely opposed by the reigning Emperor, Franz Joseph. The very title of Max Ophüls’s 1940 film, “From Mayerling to Sarajevo,” which is settling into Film Forum today for a weeklong run, suggests another story altogether. To those whose sense of history derives, as mine does, from the thumb-nail sketch offered in high school, the First World War arose from a tinderbox of overcommitted alliances that was ignited by the striking of a political match-the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip. The idea of “From Mayerling to Sarajevo” is profound and simple: to unfurl the series of events that brought Franz Ferdinand to Sarajevo on the fateful day in 1914, cherchez la femme.
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