Word: sarajevo
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Mayerling to Sarajevo (Leo Films) is 8,100 feet of celluloid whose recent peregrinations have been as exciting as any it could possibly put on the screen. Completed in February 1940, it lay idle in studio vaults, then opened in Brussels three weeks before the Nazis appeared. They quickly burned all prints but one because of its sympathetic treatment of the Habsburgs. In mid-May it began a Paris run, lasted until the Nazi occupation 26 days later when again the prints were burned. The one unburned Brussels print was smuggled to England, flown to Canada and fashionably released last...
Unreeled, Mayerling to Sarajevo retells, sometimes haltingly but always compassionately, the heckled romance of Franz Ferdinand (John Lodge), heir to Franz Josef's Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Sophie Chotek (Edwige Feuillere), his morganatic Czech wife. Its numerous revelations of Austrian pre-war court life, quite familiar now to fans long exposed to the Viennese nobility, seem new only in a simpler, more personalized view of Franz Josef (Jean Worms), the scheming Prince Montenuovo (Aime Clariond) and other appendages of the state and social hierarchy. But historically, the film-a logical sequel to 1937's teary, highly successful Mayerling...
Justified or not, the conclusions are convincing. Director Ophuls injects his picture with an air of authenticity by occasionally weaving in remarkable newsreel shots of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in action-its soldiers, palaces, pomp. The death ride at Sarajevo (TIME, July 3, 1939), vividly reconstructed, includes such precise detail as the abortive attempt at assassination during the parade to the City Hall, the Archduke's angry retorts to the Mayor's friendly welcome, the confusion over changing the return route of the parade...
Sometown in the U. S. in 1914. learning that Archduke Ferdinand has been assassinated at Sarajevo, asks whether an archduke is like a prince. News of the mobilization of 17,000,000 Europeans is like the story of a distant railway wreck, a fire in a house far away. Then one day Joe Kovacs gets a letter with a foreign stamp, from Austria, and his wife brings it to him at work. Joe Kovacs' class has been called, his fatherland has ordered him to arms, and Joe must go. At the Plaza Theatre that night, sitting with his neighbors...