The dream couple is back - a Viennese family chronicle with Maria Schell and O. W. Fischer
The 1961 film melodrama by Geza von Radvanyi (also director of "Mädchen in Uniform" (1958) with Romy Schneider and Lilli Palmer and "Onkel Toms Hütte" (1965)) is based on the play "The Four Poster" by Jan de Hartog. The film tells a family and time chronicle from Vienna from the end of Kakania (i.e. The end of the imperial and royal monarchy of Austria-Hungary after the First World War) to the annexation of Austria under Hitler to the early post-war period.
As a former dream couple, Maria Schell and O. W. Fischer (as always grossly overestimated and grossly overestimating themselves) play the factory owner couple Elisabeth and Rudolf von Hill, whose marriage, with all its ups and downs, is the focus for several decades. Infidelities, the loss of family members and the cruel blood cancer are played out against the background of historical times. O. W. Fischer can exude his penetrating, oily charm and Maria Schell ("No one cries as beautifully and quickly as Maria Schell in the film" (popular saying)) can suffer so wonderfully that it is a joy (albeit no longer appropriate for the time). .
The idea for this casting coup, through which the former dream couple Schell/Fischer could finally be seen together again in a German film, came from the great film producer Artur Brauner, who also shot the film in his CCC studios in Berlin and on location shoots in Vienna. The script was written by the Hungarian author Ladislas Fodor, who also worked with Artur Brauner on the Doctor Mabuse films, "Die Nibelungen" and "Kampf um Rom".
Basically, this film seems like a swansong for the German film industry, which was declining during these years. An old successful model that has been out of fashion for a long time is being successfully reactivated again and in the process mercilessly reveals all the deficiencies that were already there. It would have been so easy to give Maria Schell, who deservedly became a global star in recent years through films in France, Italy and America, more freedom instead of forcing her back into traditional role models.
Ten years earlier, Lilli Palmer had proven how this could be done better when she played the same material with her then husband Rex Harrison in the film "The Four Poster Bed / Das Himmelbett" and rightly received the Coppa Volpi at the Venice Film Festival for it.
Nevertheless, this film definitely remains exciting for those who are interested in German film history, if only because Maria Schell is always worth seeing. For everyone else, this Viennese chronicle might smell like mothballs.
