Meine Schwester Maria

This is a creepy movie.

It pretends to be a documentary, but it is totally scripted, totally staged, and feels totally false. It also pretends to be a tribute to Maria Schell by her younger brother Maximilian, and it is filled with so many clips from her old movies that it could make even a devoted fan pray for relief - but in actual interactions between the siblings he's so critical of her and so overbearing that it borders on abuse. Even the supposed ravages of her old age are faked and exploited for the camera, which is really infuriating.

This is a phony, cloying, suffocatingly obsessive movie that indulges Max Schell's obvious obsession with older German female movie stars. It's much like his equally creepy and equally phony "filmed" interview with Marlene Dietrich (only the audio is Dietrich; the video is faked with stand-ins), made practically against her will a couple of decades earlier, not long before she died.

After watching this supposed tribute, I cared less about Maria Schell than I did before, and I lost what little respect I still had for her brother. He was fabulous in Judgment at Nuremberg, but he's come a long way down in the five decades since then.

Maria Schell a famous Austrian actress is filmed at the age of 75 having suffered possibly a stroke living in her ancestral home.

This is a semi staged documentary highlighting problems in the last years of her life--her mental dementia foremost--but also her being broke and spending her time ordering expensive items advertised on television---she has 11 television sets on which at least according to the documentary she watches her old movies.

Her brother apparently wealthy and also a famous actor steps in and manages her life as creditors close in.

There are lots of film clips.

This is clearly a movie for fans of the actress. I had never heard of her and her very limited mental abilities allow nothing but the shallowest conversation. But it is still touching and sad.

Don't Recommend unless you know this actress

A most affecting film by actor and director Maximilian Schell of his extremely talented and beautiful sister, Maria. Contains a large number of wonderful clips from her German and American films with actors such as Gary Cooper (her favorite leading man), Marlon Brando, Oscar Werner, and others. These excerpts clearly demonstrate why Maria Schell was such an internationally acclaimed actress, especially during the period from the 1940s to the 1960s. Interwoven throughout the film are scenes from her childhood including those from private home movies. Most revealing and perhaps of most interest are scenes of her in the last years of her life in which she comments on important influences on her life and the many struggles she endured.

One of the hardest tasks in filming any plot is to keep dignity when it comes to taboo subjects.

One of those is "getting old". This film offers a close perspective to the come-into-years Maria Schell. Old-time-stories alternate with the difficulty of coping with everyday problems. After all, the film is about anyone...it is our own future. The film's words and pictures are poetry of a very special kind. Its tenderness - which only a brother can film - is without compare: 10!

I have never seen a documentary quite like this one before. It is intensely personal and intimate, full of love, exasperation, devotion, despair, and hope, all mixed up together. In short, it is a portrait of the actress, the late Maria Schell, made in 2002, three years before she died at the age of 79. Naturally, there are many film clips of Maria's amazing acting career, intelligently edited together as part of the narrative of her life, and illustrating from fiction various real aspects of her story. Maria Schell was one of the most glorious presences ever seen on the screen, and had a personality and radiant smile so like an angel that it were as if a piece of Heaven had dropped down by accident, with her sitting on it, and she had to make the best of her exile on earth. In this respect she resembles only a tiny number of actresses in the history of the cinema, such as Hayley Mills and Margaret O'Brien, who had similar angelic qualities as children, and in the case of Hayley Mills, still does as an adult, both off-screen and on. (I met Margaret O'Brien a few times long ago, but as she was then so extremely shy and introverted, I was never able to get her to speak more than a few words, so cannot honestly say what she is really like, other than that she is very nice and extraordinarily quiet.) For reasons never explained in this film, Maria Schell entered a strange mental state because of some very severe brain damage late in life. Whether this was because she had a stroke or as a result of her abortive suicide attempt (caused by a disappointment in love, which is discussed in the film) we are not told. We see a great deal of her sitting up in bed with a beatific expression on her face, as if she were a saint who had forgotten her own name, and somehow mistakenly believed that she might once have been the actress Maria Schell. She speaks coherently and intelligently within certain limits, and has perfect recall of many past events. She watches her own movies over and over again in order to reclaim her memories, and says on film that by doing so she is able to recall everything to do with the shooting of every scene minutely. Her constant watching of herself thus seems less an exercise in vanity than an attempt to remember who she is and was. Her erratic behaviour is shown by the fact that she has ordered eleven Bang & Olufsen television sets to watch herself on, and often has several of them turned on at once. She has no sense of reality or responsibility concerning everyday life anymore, and she phones up stores and orders gigantic crystal chandeliers (two at once!), despite living in a small cottage, and other crazy things, and the people she phones do not realize she is out of touch with reality, so they put the orders through. She eventually goes bankrupt as a result of wild, truly insane, spending, on things she cannot even use, and her brother Maximilian only saves her from having all of her possessions sold at auction by bailiffs at the last minute. To call the situation extremely harrowing is an understatement. Poor Maximilian Schell! He adored his sister and appreciated her perhaps better than anyone, and yet in her damaged mental state she nearly drove him crazy. But how could he be cross with her when she sat up in bed (in between ordering chandeliers) with the face, glowing eyes, and wan smile of an aged angel? Dealing with Maria in that condition was a bit like trying to discipline a beloved dog who has just eaten the supper off the dining table, because how can you explain to the dog the significance of what he has done, the sanctity of the dining table, etc.? One way dogs are disciplined to stop them 'doing their business' on the carpet is you take them by the collar and push their nose down next to the droppings and say 'Bad!' very forcefully several times, and they generally get the message. That is called house-training. But how can you house-train a brain-damaged angel and stop her buying pairs of crystal chandeliers over the telephone as soon as you leave her house? Push her nose into a chandelier? How gruelling it is to watch Maria slowly try to walk a short distance along a path (in the Austrian mountains, where she lived), in good weather and in snow, marking her progress each time with a stick and trying to learn how to walk again. Each yard gained is a triumph. Anyone who has ever been really ill, even temporarily, knows about such things, and how an inch gained at enormous effort is really a mile. At one point, Maria falls face down in the snow and lies there as if she were in Heaven, still beatific in her expression. This film is a film of adoration and testimony by Maria's nearest and dearest, her totally devoted and adoring brother, who has the advantage of having spent a lifetime in films and knew how to make the film. It is an amazing achievement, very painful to watch, but also uplifting in the awareness we derive of the power of the highest form of sibling love to ennoble and transcend, to soar above the limits, and to achieve the angelic level, where Maria Schell's true existence seems always to have been and belonged. Of Maria Schell, one is tempted to say with awe: 'She came and lived amongst us for a time, and then was gone.'