Austrian star and director Willi Forst is one of the cinema greats but often the most ardent movie enthusiast hasn’t heard of him, let alone viewed their way through his substantial body of work. As an actor, he co-starred with Lillian Harvey in Ein blonder Traum and a pre-Blue Angel Marlene Dietrich in Café elektric and Gefaren de brausit and his work as director extended over three decades.
I encountered Forst when new (West) German material was first shown in Australia post-WW2. East Germany was a blessing to “serious” film criticism which only had the draggy Slatan Dudow-Brecht Khule wampe to offer as German Marxist film. That didn’t work out too well when The Wall went up and the East Germans banned an entire season of DEFA’s output as being compromised by foreign ideology. We are beginning to see the problem. Forst’s career spanned Germany’s Third Reich, leaving him tainted by association. There is no suggestion in his output that he sympathised with Nazi values or even their aesthetics. Being an element of the Viennese scene had given him a measure of separation.
The belated arrival of (black and white) TV in fifties Australia revived awareness of thirties Busby Berkley and co. What we didn’t know about then was the parallel blossoming of the German musical with Erik (White Horse Inn) Charell’s 1931 three-language Der Kongreß tanzt/ Old Vienna/The Congres Dances/Le congrés s’amuse followed in 1933 by Forst's Maskerade. Rivalry between the Ameican and Viennese traditions will be dramatised in Forst's fabulous 1949 Wiener Mädeln. His productions would become the only example of the quality end of previously mighty German-language film to survive the arrival of the National Socialists and the departure of Erich Pommer. Sorry Hans Albers, you gave it a good try but all we ever saw was Leni Reifenstahl’s boring Nazis
I didn’t find my enthusiasm mirrored in Europe where the few people who recognised Willi Forst’s name said I should be putting the time in on Max Ophuls, the first filmmaker to feature at the London NFT incidentally. Turned out that I’d already seen Ophuls’ best work and long nights in the Paris Cinémathèque further undermined his status – though I did quite enjoy their three-tints copy of his Tendre enemie. I would come to the conclusion that Ophuls was Willi Forst light, though for many years the only indication had been that one, decades-old library 16mm. of Maskerade. Now after all this time, sub-titles are appearing on Youtube copies.
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| Theft of the Mona Lisa - Forst |
Maskerade/Masquerade in Vienna proves not to be the start of the cycle. In the first years of sound, Forst had appeared for director Géza von Bolváry in a series of Walter Reisch’s scripts including Zwei Herzen im Dreiviertel-Takt/Two hearts in Waltz Time, Das Lied ist aus Der Herr auf Bestellung and the exceptional 1931 Der Raub der Mona Lisa /Theft of the Mona Lisa. However, with Maskerade Forst took over direction, von Bolváry’s status never recovering.
Maskerade asserts as the archetype off which subsequent efforts were struck, pretty much the key work of the Alt Wien cycle, launching Anton Walbrook/Adolf Wohlbrük as the ultimate European movie sophisticate, opposite theatre-trained actress Paula Wessely. The Wessely-Walter Reisch Episode is modled on it. Reisch’s actress wife Lisl Handl borrowed the Poldi Dur character name for appearances. MGM’s Escapade is a re-make. That studio was particularly determined to manufacture their own Viennese tradition, putting out three versions of "The Merry Widow" and importing doe eyed Luise Rainer to front productions. They had had Jacques Feyder directing Ramon Novarro and Helen Chandler in the excellent if compromised 1931 Daybreak from an Arthur Schnitzler piece with the Duvivier life of Johan Strauss, The Great Waltz to come. Little wonder Joe Pasternak rolled up there.
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| Wohlbrück/Walbrook & Tschechowa |
Maskerade has a great opening with the Masked Ball in progress – streamers, dancing masked couples and Olga Tschechowa (Hitchcock’s Mary and conspicuous in the Dupont Moulin Rouge) sweeps up in the feathery shoulderless number to accept the Tombola prize chinchilla muff. At this point, sketch artist Anton makes his great entrance down the white stairs into the festive activity, still munching his paper horn of Sascha sweets, and Olga moves on him, producing a pistol/cigarette case to threaten him into reviving their liaison but Anton (cheeky possum) demands an introduction to her sister in law to-be Hilde von Stolz. Blonde women in curls are bound to be trouble in these films.
Olga warning him off doesn’t stop Anton moving on Hilde, proposing she poses nude for him. Turns out she doesn’t need any urging, immediately hiring a fiaker to take her to his studio. Her fiancé, court music director Walter Janssen and his brother, Olga’s husband, bearded Royal Chief of Surgery Peter Petersen won’t notice. They are going to be arguing about Bach all night, while the orchestra plays “You Should See Me Do the Polka” in the background.
Anton’s housekeeper Grete Natzler, whose Fandango-pose painting dominates the hallway, has admitted Hilde and soon the visitor is Anton's subject in only the borrowed muff. However sketch completed, he loses interest and sends her off. Next morning he’s up late after all this exertion and the housekeeper lets his publisher’s runner have the drawing, which we never get to see. It appears on the magazine cover of the next day’s Carnival issue - montage of sniggering groups, barber shop dandies, ballet girls, hospital staff. Petersen assumes the worst and orders his inoffensive brother to demand satisfaction.
Janssen presents himself to Anton, who assures him the model was another girl. Told “If you don’t give me a name, I’ll have to challenge you”, the artist invents one, which happens to be unique in the Vienna ‘phone book, that of ladies companion Paula Wessely. She, it turns out, has won over not only elderly Princess employer Julia Serda but also gardener Hans Moser by her daily readings from the news papers. Janssen turns up at the Princess’ coffee and chocolate cake afternoon gathering to verify and a ball invitation he offers the Aristocrat is declined and passed to her companion, who is thrilled at the prospect of going to a society event. They have a gown which is just her size and, despite her round shoulders and boyish haircut, Paula turns out plausibly glamorous. She’s a bit puzzled by all this conversation about the brother everyone except her knows.
At the ball, Anton who of course has never met her, is smitten and carries Paula off, away from the snobby society guests to a cheery beer garden (we keep on seeing this juxtaposition – The Congress Dances, Michael Curtiz’ The Mad Genius) It’s a big ask to believe worldly Anton is enraptured by the simple servant but that’s where the picture lives. You have to give them a bit of suspension of disbelief.
His character is even more remarkable than the leads – austere, forbidding and entitled, to the point where there is no question of involving himself in a common duel (like Louis Salou in Les enfants du paradis) he faces the hysterical Wessely and it will be Peterson who will get to make the iconic hand kissing gesture that resolves the film. His extended story becomes more involving than the leads’. Revealingly the comparable John Barrymore character in MGM's Maytime is obliterated in a comparison.
It would be difficult to find a 1934 film made anywhere in the world with such accomplished technique, though we are told equipment was basic. Cast, costumes and setting are matched by sure editing (nice use of hard-edged wipes) and camerawork by the great Franz Planer later to film Hollywood's most effective Viennese outing, Ophuls' A Letter to an Unknown Woman, along with The Big Country and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Maskerade has the ability to draw in an audience who have no knowledge of its imaginary on-screen world and make it as compelling as their own. The Waltz (and polka and the rest) cycle appears to have been established with this film. It became the prototype of more than a decade of a European music drama rival to Busby Berkley World as the gold standard in popular entertainment of the day. Forst’s 1949 Wiener Mädeln dramatises that US-European musical competition – even if that contest is now all but forgotten. Too many critics and fans are unaware when they are foot soldiers in culture wars.
Forst and Wessely now a hot ticket, re-surface as co-stars of the 1934 So endete eine Liebe/So Ended a Great Love directed by Karl Hartl from another Walter Reisch script, which places the leads in The Congress Dances’ Napoleonic setting. The French Emperor’s calamitous campaigns still loomed large in European awareness, not unlike the conquest of the American West in the U.S. The lack of this dominant frame of reference diminishes contemporary Hollywood Napoleon films like Frank Borzage’s Hearts Divided or the Garbo Marie Walewska once again from MGM.
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| Paula Wesswely and Willi Forst |
The playboy Duke discovers that the nineteen year old (!) girl has nursed a crush on him, after his promise to return years before, only to now find he's there to tell her that she's to marry the Emperor who needs a childbearing spouse.
Particularly after seeing Ridley Scott’s giggly depiction of the Imperial match, Forst and Wessely seem an unlikely mature aged rendition of the historic characters but the pair, at the top of their game, prove irresistible. Wessely realising that her beloved is the agent of her destruction and Forst desperate to assert himself with the powerful, who rather than dismiss his pleas, share his anguish, offer the whole Viennese doomed costume romance.
More charm pours out of the screen. Mounting is elaborate and imposing, complete with much striding about designer Werner Schlichting’s palace decors in white tights, carrying swords that are never drawn. Spot the set-height white double doors used in Maskerade. It all comes backed by Franz Grothe’s score and is again expertly filmed by Planer. Classy! Forget Joachim Phoenix. We are seeing a plausible first run of the Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux in Mayerling cycle.
The YouTube version is uneven – gummed together from several copies where French sub-titles come and go behind the new computer translation.
By the time we get to 1935’s Vienna-filmed Episode, the impetus of thirties German-speaking sound film is already winding down. Now directed by Reisch, this is a toothless attempt at RomCom with everyone doing their best to be winning, as the middle-aged leads struggle to involve us in their comedy of confusions.
The opening raises expectations. It's 1922 Vienna but it’s not waltz time. Among more streamers, the black girl cafe vocalist is doing "Yes, We Have No Bananas." In a sustained take, Harry Stradling's camera circles the orchestra and dancing couples, while a floozy picks the pocket of her drunken escort and goes off to dance with the gigolo seen adjusting his make up in his pocket compact mirror. At the bar, a stressed drinker is told that two men are waiting for him outside, unable to enter the formal event without diner suits. He shoots himself.
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| Wessely |
Turns out he was a city banker who had lost twenty-eight million crowns in speculations, wiping out the savings of depositors, including elderly Rosa Albach-Retty, now in a panic making her first-ever long distance call to daughter, senior class art student Wessely. Paula has to desert Professor Ferdinand Mayerhofer's clay sculptures to storm into the office of Dr. Walter Janssen. He can only confirm the disaster. The meager savings of the mother's lifetime will no longer be there to pay her a pension.Paula lies to Albach-Retty and abandons her studies to provide for the old woman. Hunting employment, she considers stuffing envelopes and other such menial tasks but none are to be found. Her bouncy blonde chum Friedl Czepa has a Hungarian to meet her needs and proposes his Romanian friend for Paula, who is politely outraged. Though desperation sets in, she tells fatherly Otto Treßler that she's not that sort of girl and he proposes regular cheques for merely accompanying him to theatres and cafes with the occasional peck on the cheek. The attempt to sanitise this one has already done in its credibility.
Now one of these Treßler rendez vous coincides with a wedding anniversary that he had forgotten and he has to send his sons' tutor in dual piano, former Uberleutenant Karl Ludwig Diehl (The Devil's General) to tell Paula he can't make it. Well one thing leads to another and Paula and Karl dance the night away, despite her shaky stiletto heel on the shoe that Czepa borrowed. The sons misunderstand the situation and accuse one another of associating with Paula. Diehl slaps them and resigns but their mother, Erika von Wagner (the Curtiz Austrian Sodom & Gomorrah) knows that an officer who commanded the respect of his troops for four years of the late war would not act irresponsibly.
It of course all ends happily due to the saintly understanding of mother knowing best von Wagner. The handling is studiofied. It trades heavily in Viennese atmosphere - balls, cafes, private boxes, art montages and street performers. There's a nice superimposition where silhouette dancers appear on lines of "Pizzicato Polka" sheet music. "When day is Done" plays on the track. All this might have introduced an artificiality needed to boost cred. The scene where Wessely and Diehl unite at the street brazier in the snow, observed by the passing musicians, edges towards the ambience they want to believe they are offering but, despite all the effort, this one is hopelessly over shadowed by Maskerade. They need Anton Walbrook and another duel to get by.
Reisch, writing collaborator with Bracket and Wilder, joined the pair in Hollywood, notably for Ninotchka. He never managed to navigate his directing career past Universal’s Song of Scheherezade. Appealing actress wife Elisabeth (Liesl) Handl appears peripherally here. Stradling, whose imaginative lighting manages the odd striking shadow, did better, continuing his distinguished globe trotting with La kermesse heroique, Streetcar Named Desire and My Fair Lady.
These three Wessely films can only provide a shadowy representation of the cycle they represent. Forst, Walbrook, Lillian Harvey, Karl Hartl, Ludwig Berger and the rest would – maybe will – provide material for more detailed studies than this. Meanwhile I remain glued to the TV, busily making up for lost time.
Barrie Pattison 2024
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