Le Secret de Mayerling (1949)
Directed by Jean Delannoy

Film Review

The mysterious deaths of Archduke Rudolph and his teenage lover Marie Vetsera at a pivotal moment in the history of Austro-Hungary have long been a cause of speculation, with several books and films offering plausible explanations to account for this real-life Romeo and Juliet tragedy.  Interest in Rudolph's death is justified by its historical significance - it was an event that not only sounded the death knell for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it also brought about the circumstances for two devastating world wars and much of what followed.  The twentieth century would have been very different if that fateful meeting at Mayerling had never taken place on that cold winter's night in 1889.

Claude Anet's 1930 novel Idyll's End proferred the most likely account of the death of the the crown prince Rodlph and Marie Vetsera - a double suicide - and this is the version that Anatole Litvak was content to serve up in his film Mayerling (1936), starring Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux (later remade in 1968 by Terence Young).  As plausible as the suicide theory was, there was always a suspicion that Archduke Rudolph did not kill himself but was in fact the victim of a political assassination motivated to preserve the unity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  It wasn't until the 1940s that these suspicions were apparently substantiated by tangible (albeit questionable) evidence.  Inspired by this 'new evidence', Jean Delannoy's Le Secret de Mayerling presents an alternative story to that seen in Litvak's film, dispensing with the convenient romantic myth and showing how the unfortunate Archduke may have met his end as a victim of a cold blooded political machination.

By this stage in his career, Jean Delannoy had firmly established himself as one of the leading exponents of what would later be termed (in a derogatory sense) the quality tradition in French cinema.  Before the untethered Rottweilers and cultural illiterates on the Cahiers du cinéma had trashed his reputation, Delannoy was widely revered and by the late 1940s he already had a string of notable critical and commercial successes to his name - Pontcarral, colonel d'empire (1942), L'Éternel Retour (1943), La Symphonie pastorale (1946).  Le Secret de Mayerling was another prestige production that was well-received by the critics and a box office success (it attracted an audience of just under two and half million in France).  It's not hard to account for the film's popularity - in addition to its crowd-pulling subject matter, it boasts a formidable cast and showcases French cinema of the period at its grandest, with a production design to rival any comparable Hollywood feature.

Jean Marais was an easy shoe-in for the role of the doomed Archduke Rodolph - the big budget costume drama was the milieu in which the actor appeared most at home, as he had already demonstrated in Jean Cocteau's L'Aigle à deux têtes (1947).  Interestingly, this earlier film had been inspired by the assassination of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, the mother of the character that Marais played in Le Secret de Mayerling.  In the latter film, the part of the Empress Elisabeth went to Marguerite Jamois, who was the actress Cocteau originally had in mind for the lead female role in L'Aigle à deux têtes.  Making a remarkable screen debut in the role of Marie Vetsera (Marais's exquisitely fragile screen lover) is the 21-year-old Dominique Blanchar, daughter of the legendary French actor of stage and screen, Pierre Blanchar.  The extraordinary cast includes many other notable performers, not least of which is Claude Farrell, who leaves a memorable impression as the calculating Marie Larisch, one of the film's more interesting characters.

Surprisingly, the film begins at the end of the tragic tale, with the immediate aftermath of the death of the Archduke Rudolph.  Moodly lit with some quite eerie expressionistic touches, this sombre opening can hardly fail to send a shiver down the spine and establishes a suitably oppressive mood for what follows, an extended flashback that has none of the drippy romanticism of Litvak's film.  Typically, Delannoy eschews soppy sentimentality and sticks with cold realism throughout, the result being one of the bleakest and most crushingly prosaic of his films.  Far more time is devoted to political intrigue than the burgeoning romance between the Archduke and his teen admirer (Marais doesn't even appear on screen until the third reel).  Jacques Rémy's script makes Rudolph a far more ambiguous and somewhat less sympathetic character than Boyer's interpretation in Mayerling, and this allows Marais to give one of his more nuanced performances, totally convincing as a dissipated political agitator tired of life and yet not ready to die.

The haunting solemity of the film's opening (the most memorable of any Jean Delannoy film) is matched by the intensely grim tone of its ending - Hitchcock could hardly have brought more devilishly controlled tension to the impending climax.  The historical accuracy of Le Secret de Mayerling has been widely disputed but the film still brings a frightening plausibility to one of the possible explanations for Archduke Rudolph's death.  Even if you find it hard to accept this version of events, it is still a profoundly unsettling piece of cinema - a chilling reminder of how far those who have political power are willing to stoop in pursuit of their aims.

Film Synopsis

In the early hours of 30th January 1889, the Archduke Rudolph, crown prince of Austria, is found dead in his hunting lodge at Mayerling, lying on his bed beside his 17-year-old lover Marie Vetsera.  The most likely explanation - that the couple commited suicide on realising that their affair could go nowhere - is the one that the Emperor Franz-Joseph and his court have decided will be accepted as a recorded fact.  But the doctors who examined the bodies have reason to challenge the verdict of suicide and it looks just as likely that the Archduke was the victim of a carefully engineered political assassination.  After all, in the months preceding his death, the crown prince had been an overt supporter of the cause for Hungarian independence.  Was it to save the Austro-Hungarian Empire that he met his untimely end at Mayerling, in the arms of the woman who was dearest to him...?