30 December 2011

Mädchenjahre einer Königin


This is a film by Ernst Marischka, a director I'm not to familiar with.
We are both more familiar with the actors and actresses, not least Romy Schneider, Karl Ludwig Diehl and Romy's mother Magda Schneider.

We are also familiar with the personalities in the film: Queen Victoria of England (Romy Schneider), Prince Albert (Adrian Hoven) and Lord Melbourne (Karl Ludwig Diehl), her first prime minister and adviser.
Victoria is about to be crowned queen of England but Lord Melbourne has planned a wedding for her, without consulting her. She is going to be married to the German prince Albert but she doesn't like the idea of being married to a person she doesn't know, wherefore she decides to flee London for a few days.
She stays incognito at a tavern, in company with Baroness Lehzen (Magda Schneider) and there she meets a young, handsome man with whom she falls in love.
The young man happens to be Albert but he doesn't recognize her and she doesn't recognize him, until he is presented to her at the castle during a ball.

This is a very 'light-weighted' film with the 1950's charm and colour and with a very prudish way of telling the story about how these two individuals met, their love affairs and so on.
What happened in 'reality' is of course hard to say but what seems to be clear is that it was Victoria who proposed to Albert, not the opposite. Maybe this was the 'rules'.
It's also interesting to see mother and daughter in the same film even if the two Schneider's have acted together in other films, often with Magda playing Maria's mother or aunt (Wenn der weiße Flieder wieder blüht or Sissi).

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