CINEMA
Pot-shots
PENELOPE HOUSTON
Mayerling (Warner, 'A') Challenge in she Snow (Berkeley, 'U')
Shakos, flunkeys, opera glasses, fur muffs, deafening jinglings of harness; 'Is that the Archduke?"No, my dear, it is the Crown Prince'; Venice in the rain, snow and suicide at the hunting-lodge; 'I am your own Mitzi'; the regiment rides at dawn. . . . It can't be said that Terence Young's Mayerling hasn't tried, at least, to live up to the reputation estab- lished by earlier screen versions of this slightly lugubrious episode in Hapsburg history. The impression, however, is less of the first swallow heralding that returning summer of high movie romanticism we are all supposed to have been pining for, than of a vaguely uneasy cuckoo.
Really to carry off this difficult and artificial genre, you probably need overwhelming star power, a camera style that is itself a romantic gesture, and a fairly flagrant disregard for his- torical facts other than the more panoplied ones. Terence Young's script can be as eccen- trically feckless as any : 'My mother is eighty- five,' sighs the visiting Edward of Wales, heart- lessly promoting Queen Victoria, in 1888, to a premature octogenarianism. Elsewhere, though, there's a kind of 0-level concern with elementary details of the Hungarian indepen- dence movement (student riots thrown in); and perhaps a mounting suspicion that the whole sad story of the neurotic, morphine-addicted princeling and his twenty year old baroness is rather less romantic than everyone is trying to pretend.
In conversation, Terence Young tells us that it took all of five hours and a bottle of brandy,. for Rudolf to screw up his nerve between shooting Maria Vetsera and turning the gun on himself. On the screen, a romantic haze obscures this awkward interval. But the Mayer- ling mystery, with its surrounding detail, still remains more sordidly intriguing than the film's tepid juggling with loyal retainers, snowflakes, pistols and clasped hands. Performances are in the upholstered history division. Omar Sharifs Rudolf toys tiredly with orchids and mistresses; Catherine Deneuve, who can suggest a cool Alice in Wonderland by Tenniel out of Buffuel, here dwindles into an abstracted prettiness. It looks dangerously like a suicide pact born of fatigue. The older generation, though, is in fighting form with James Mason's heavily human Franz-Josef and Ava Gardner's Empress Elizabeth. Miss Gardner may not be anyone's idea of an empress but she's everyone's idea of a star, rocketing around Schonbrunn showing off the imperial wardrobe, and occasionally descending on a scene, taking it by the scruff of its neck, and shaking it not into life but into vintage Hollywood.
Challenge in the Snow, the film by Claude Lelouch and Francois Reichenbach about the Winter Olympics at Grenoble, takes no self- effacing view of France's share in the Games. A besotted pursuit of Jean-Claude Killy, the national ski hero, and other French medal winners, mixes in with a further instalment of Lelouch's public love affair with his camera, all gush and gasp and show-off prettiness. Some marvellous shots of de Gaulle at the opening ceremony, abstractedly sniffing at an artificial rose petal which has descended on him from the skies, and some tolerably exhilarating stuff around the ski slopes. But, chauvinistic French sports mania apart, the general impression is slightly feverish; as though the sports column had fallen into the hands of one of our merci- lessly trendy women's pages.
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