The Angel with the Trumpet

This is a film which tries toencapsulate 50 years of Austrian history in 90 minutes.The title is a bit off-putting as it refers to the piano manufacturing business of the main characters.Some characters speak with an accent others in a home counties accent.However it is interesting and is worth a view.

Henrietta Stein is a young woman on the back side of twenty having a discreet affair with Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria in the 1880's. Their relationship is little more than a friendship to Rudolf although Henrietta is in love. 31-year-old Rudolf in fact openly confesses his love for a seventeen year old to Henrietta. Realizing their is no future with Rudolf, Henrietta accepts the proposal of Alt, a prosperous piano manufacturer. Rudolf commits suicide on the night of the wedding although his actions appear to be unrelated to the marriage.

Henrietta has a comfortable, settled life as Mrs. Alt but by the turn of the new century has become bored and is neglected by her husband. A Baron friend of Rudolf's whisks her away to a week of public if chaste romance which results in a duel fought between the Baron and Alt. The film then follows the family through two World Wars and a changing Austria.

This ambitious British film seems to be two movies tacked together, the first half seems to be a fictionalized period biopic along the lines of The Great Waltz but with the dawn of World War I for the section half becomes a Cavalcadesque family saga. The cast is very good, particularly Eileen Herlie although she absurdly ages in a period of six years (still having her youthful beauty in 1914 but becoming an old lady by 1920). This film has likely been seen by more American audiences in the past decade than in it's original release back in 1950 due to it's availability online and on public domain DVD releases. The movie looks a bit more of an epic than it really is with the lavish Alt home and the decades sweeping story but sets are somewhat limited and one can't help noting the cast is rather small for a film covering such a long period. This mix of history with fiction (the movie suggests Rudolf's suicide was due to his frustrations with his father and their differences on running the country) and undeveloped plot suggestions (there's a very light hint that Henrietta is pregnant with Rudolf's child at the time of her marriage to Alt but that story is never confirmed or acknowledged in the film) doesn't always work but it holds one's interest until the last reel if not quite succeeding in making one care about the characters.

You could say "The Angel with the Trumpet" is the story of a house or, at least, the story of a family and it was a very strange picture to have come out of Britain at the time until you realise it was a remake of an Austrian film made 2 years earlier. It begins at the end of the 19th century and follows one particular family living in the same house in Vienna up to the rise of Nazism and it's populated by a cast of well-known British thespians being very British while pretending they're Austrian. It was directed by the actor Anthony Bushell who also appears and it features early performances from a couple of actual Austrian actors, namely Maria Schell and Oskar Werner.

The star of the picture is Eileen Herlie, who basically links the stories through the decades. She's really quite superb but the film is stiffer than a shop full of corsets and virtually everyone else miscast. It's certainly beautifully designed and photographed and Bushell's direction is both imaginative and subtle but who in hell did they imagine would pay to see it. This kind of yarn went out with the Ark or at least with D. W. Griffith. A curio that is virtually unknown today, (the original isn't known at all), but one that, in its very odd way, may be actually worth rediscovering.

As an adolescent,I first saw this film on our black-and-white TV. I was deeply moved by it then, so much so that over fifty years later I still remember some scenes vividly. First there is the luminous Maria Schell, who dominates the post WWII story. She is a gifted, but impoverished, pianist who marries the scion of the great piano-manufacturing family that is the heart of the story. If I remember correctly, the family is part Jewish and had paid dearly under Nazi persecution. One son in the preceding generation even falls under the spell of the Nazis in the thirties and forties.

The saga begins with the Jewish founder of the firm and his aristocratic. non-Jewish wife. This marriage has its own problems. I will not spoil it by recounting several touching scenes, for the wife is close to the Hapsburg court and gets intimately involved with the decline of that unhappy family. The drama begins slowly, but builds momentum as the family saga continues.

A film worth seeing. It is riveting and encapsulates Austrian history from pre WWI to post WWII. Unfortunately it is not available in any format, anywhere in the English-speaking market. The Ernst Lothar novel is available from used book dealers and (perhaps) in some libraries. Pity!

The story of a wealthy family in Vienna from the end of the Austrian Empire through the Nazi's and WWII. Somewhat old fashioned and it starts a little slowly, but wonderfully made and very moving. Cast is mostly British but includes some real Austrians such as Maria Schell and Oskar Werner. Perhaps I am somewhat biased because I have always been interested in "old Vienna" but I found it fascinating.