Word: litvak
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Under the surprisingly unimaginative direction of Anatole Litvak the film plays a sad game of Hollywood tag with a Romanoff myth. Ingrid Bergman, the poor heroine, is taken in tow by a group of schemers (led by Yul Brynner) who want her to be recognized as Anastasia only in order to get their hands on her unclaimed inheritance. They plough all the proper aristocratic graces and memories into the haunted girl, and finally present her to the dowager empress (Helen Hayes). The pupil now and then surprises her tutors with fragments of memories that could come only from the real...
Mayerling was the most expensive, most publicised dramatic show in the history of television. The advertisements and a cover story in Life magazine loudly proclaimed that sponsor RCA and producer Anatole Litvak had spent half a million dollars to restage Litvak's screen success of twenty years ago, and that Audrey Hepburn and her husband, Mel Ferrer, had been hired to perform in it. After it was all over, however, the ad men would have had a difficult time convincing anybody that Mayerling was anything but a monumental bore...
Producer's Showcase (Mon. 8 p.m., NBC). Anatole Litvak's $500,000 Mayer- ling, starring Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer as the star-crossed lovers (color...
...actors, in general, make good use of their melodramatic opportunities. Yul Brynner is gloweringly glamorous as the villain. Helen Hayes is effective as the Empress, but her work, like much about this picture, has been scanted by the inept direction of Anatole Litvak. Director Litvak made his worst mistake in connection with Ingrid Bergman. Her acting is competent, but only now and then toward the end of the picture, almost as if by accident, can the moviegoer see what he probably will want most of all to see on the screen: the fact that, seven years after her abdication...
...Gary Merrill and Richard Basehart--acts in the best tradition of a class B film unit on location in Europe for the first time. This means lots of gutsy tough guys swimming icy Rhines, capturing Germans two-fisted, and helping motherly nuns rebuild their nunneries. The photography and Mr. Litvak's roman candles and firecrackers are very effective...