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In life, the Archduke Rudolf was a rake and good amateur naturalist, organized a historical survey of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was rated as a dangerous radical for his anticlerical views. In the person of Charles Boyer he is represented as a handsome neurotic, ridden by court ceremonial, badgered by his father's spies, obstructed from netting the fluttering virginity of a beautiful child Baroness (Danielle Darrieux). Following the type of all well-bred monarchical romances, the Prince enjoys himself most when sharing incognito the simple pleasures of the poor. At the Prater, he spends an idyllic evening at the Punch-&-Judy show, throwing hoops round the necks of swans. Ordered next night to a command performance of the opera, he sees his dreamgirl, a shy debutante, take her mother's box for the first time. By secret assignations they share many a trystful profile, give U. S. audiences ample reason to applaud Danielle Darrieux's Dresden-china features. The young Baroness' mother hears of the affair, packs the girl off to forgetfulness in Trieste, where she pines for her rakish Rudolf, finally returns to him. In the hopeless hideaway of his hunting lodge, their story ends.
Directed by Anatole Litvak with a sort of unflagging belief in third-rate melodrama, Mayerling is helped toward verisimilitude by the accuracy of its baroque Viennese trimmings, and by the excellent representational music of Arthur Honegger. More serious cinemagoers, however, may wish that the story had come a little closer to grips with human fact, if only by cribbing the moral that Playwright Maxwell Anderson set to the tale in his Masque of Kings last winter: that to rule brutalizes. The Lower Depths (Albatros). Maxim Gorki, literary darling of the Russian masses both before and after the revolution, wrote The Lower Depths in 1902 to show the disease, despair and degradation of human beings at the bottom of Russia's Tsarist pile. Gorki's pre-Soviet cellarful of morbid, introspective thieves, drunkards and derelicts has been brought to the screen by France's Director Jean Renoir (Madame Bovary, Toni), son of the impressionist painter. In a foreword he announces his film as "human" rather than specifically Russian drama. For realistic squalor and decay Renoir copied the 1936 slums of Villeneuve-la-Garenne, Paris suburb.
Pepel (Jean Gabin), a handsome thief, lives in a basement flophouse run by a receiver of stolen goods, Kostylev (Vladimir Sokoloff) and his wife Vassilissa (Suzy Prim), Pepel's mistress. Other muttering, miasmal inmates are: an alcoholic actor, a streetwalker addicted to reading sentimental novels aloud, and a genuine bankrupt baron who abandons his palace to live in filth. Threatened by the police, Vassilissa attempts to force her pretty little sister Natacha (Junie Astor) to marry a pudgy, petty official. In a resulting brawl old Kostylev is killed and Pepel goes to jail. A new ending, wildly out of key, but approved in script form by Gorki before his death in 1936, has Pepel mysteriously out of prison walking hand in hand with Natacha down a country road, silhouetted as radiantly as any triumphant Hollywood couple.