Import

The Secret of Mayerling (Commercial Pictures) is another French retelling of the famed historical whodunit posed by the violent death of Habsburg Crown Prince Rudolph and his young mistress, and still another version of what really happened to them in the royal hunting lodge near Vienna on the night of Jan. 30, 1889.

In 1937's lushly romantic Mayerling, Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux played out the theory of a suicide pact, inspired by Emperor Franz Joseph's order to break off the love affair. The real dope, whispers the new picture confidentially, is that the Prince (Jean Marais) and Marie Vetsera (Dominique Blanchar) were victims of a political intrigue. They planned suicide, all right, even left notes. But after they changed their minds, a German agent slipped into the bedroom and finished the job with his pistol.*

The movie's treatment of the political maneuvering is unconvincingly hazy, and its melodrama slow. But plenty is left of the love affair, and Director Jean (God Needs Men) Delannoy makes it no less romantic than it was in Mayerling.

Actress Blanchar, young (19), pretty and completely charming, is perfectly cast as a fluttery court neophyte, aglow with soulful love for Rudolph. Actor Marais, playing the moody, princely rake, sizes her up as a pushover, deigns to use her for passing pleasure. They learn each other's true motives in an intimate sequence brimming with Gallic candor and style, and as they manage to reconcile their conflicting emotions, their scenes blossom into a gauzy mood of idyllic romance.

*A far cry from the latest nonfiction account of the mystery. In Rudolph: The Tragedy of Mayerling (TIME, Jan. 17, 1949), Hungarian Count Carl Lonyay, whose uncle later married Rudolph's widow, reconstructs the affair as the climax of a psychopathic melodrama, motivated by Rudolph's unhealthy fascination for sex and death. According to Author Lonyay's version, the bored, philandering Rudolph, morbidly intrigued with the idea of double suicide, talks mistress Marie Vetsera (his third choice for the role) into the act, then takes ten hours to shoot himself after finishing her off.

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