Mayerling

Mayerling was the most expensive, most publicised dramatic show in the history of television. The advertisements and a cover story in Life magazine loudly proclaimed that sponsor RCA and producer Anatole Litvak had spent half a million dollars to restage Litvak's screen success of twenty years ago, and that Audrey Hepburn and her husband, Mel Ferrer, had been hired to perform in it. After it was all over, however, the ad men would have had a difficult time convincing anybody that Mayerling was anything but a monumental bore.

Not that the historical incident on which both the film and the show were based lacks interest. On the morning of the last day of January in 1889 Archduke Rudolph, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was found shot dead in the royal hunting lodge at Mayerling. Beside him, and apparently the second member of a suicide pact, lay the body of the young Countess Maria Vetsera. Their deaths were the culmination of a hopeless love affair--hopeless because Rudolph had been married long before he ever met Maria. Such a story is the stuff of which fairy tales, or even tragedy, is made, but it certainly did not provide the material for a successful television show.

The blame for the failure is not hard to fix. It rests squarely on the script writer, who, happily for his professional reputation, was not named in the screen credits. Mayerling had a large number of cliches, even for a television play. The members of the huge cast were constantly called on to deliver such literary gems as, "Anything is possible if you really want it." And most of the situations were as trite as the lines. For instance, when the love-stricken Rudolph is supposed to be shown pursuing Maria, where do we find him? Kneeling behind her in church! Almost every situation in the show looked as though it had been used before, and most of them were, many in the recent movie War and Peace.

It is scarcely surprising that the actors failed to do much with their inept material. Audrey Hepburn looked lovely as usual, but her talents as an actress were confined to delivering an occasional shy smile. And Mel Ferrer once more exhibited his really astonishing capacity for looking bored. The one man who might have rescued the show from tedium, Raymond Massey, was not allowed to do anything but sneer in his role as Prime Minister. To be sure, they all appeared quite handsome in their fine uniforms, which were broadcast in color, but it is still very tempting to suggest that they return to their Cinemascope studios and try again. The only trouble is that they just possibly might do it.