![]() ![]() Ophüls’s film is indeed a love story, and a grand one-the story of another thwarted romance that shook the throne-but it’s also an expressly political story as well as a vision of monarchic rule. On the face of it, hinting that Germany was once again rampaging through Europe because of Hitler’s screwed-up love life would be the height of decadence and frivolity. Ophüls, who was German and Jewish, escaped to France when Hitler took power, and he made “From Mayerling to Sarajevo” as another war was beginning in Europe. The sublimity of the notion is precisely in its audacity-and in the risk of being misunderstood. The woman in question is the Countess Sophie Chotek, a minor Czech aristocrat whom he married against the wishes of the Emperor, Franz Joseph. The idea of the film is profound and simple: to unfurl the series of events that brought Franz Ferdinand to Sarajevo on the fateful day in 1914_, cherchez la femme_. Ophüls’s film, even unseen, points to the origins of war in romance, to the roots of politics in personal relationships. Rudolf’s death promoted Franz Joseph’s brother, Karl Ludwig, and then his nephew, Franz Ferdinand, to Crown Prince. The Mayerling incident, of 1889, was the double suicide (or murder-suicide) of the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf and his seventeen-year-old lover, Mary Vetsera, whose relationship was fiercely opposed by the reigning Emperor, Franz Joseph. ![]() ![]() The very title of Max Ophüls’s 1940 film, “From Mayerling to Sarajevo,” which is settling into Film Forum today for a weeklong run, suggests another story altogether. To those whose sense of history derives, as mine does, from the thumb-nail sketch offered in high school, the First World War arose from a tinderbox of overcommitted alliances that was ignited by the striking of a political match-the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip. The idea of “From Mayerling to Sarajevo” is profound and simple: to unfurl the series of events that brought Franz Ferdinand to Sarajevo on the fateful day in 1914, cherchez la femme. ![]()
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