The Angel with the Trumpet

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!

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.

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.

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.

Based on a very long and dense 1942 novel by Ernst Lothar, 'Der Engel mit der Posaune' was originally filmed in Austria in 1948 by Karl Hartl, who is credited as the producer on this somewhat disjointed English-language remake.

Although most of the cast are now British, crowd scenes and exteriors from the German-language original have visibly been recycled, as well as Willi Schmidt-Gentner's noisy score, while extremely youthful Maria Schell and Oskar Werner reprise their parts in smaller roles (along with Anton Edthofer, who briefly reappears from the original, presumably dubbed, as Franz Josef).

Eileen Herlie brings a strong presence to this rare big screen lead as half-Jewish Henrietta Stein, who we are expected to believe it was over her rather than Marie Vetsera that Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself at Mayerling in 1889. Already thirty when the film was made and looking it, she thereafter ages extremely unconvincingly over the next five decades, although in a better film her performance would doubtless have been more impressive.