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The comparison is not at all farfetched. Perhaps not since the full-blown Garbo has the old world offered to the new such a prepotent image of the eternal feminine as can be seen in the mysteriously soulful face of Maria Schell. It is the face of a princess in a German fairy tale. Her hair is still the palest gold, and it tumbles over her shoulders, when she lets it down, in quietly melodious loops. Her skin is white and perfect. Her mouth is delicate, and her smile almost too exquisitely sweet. Her eyes change, as the light changes, from blue to grey to green, and are unusually large; when she smiles, they brim with tenderness and a kind of luminous spirituality that seems to tame the beast and inspire the best in men. Says a hardbitten, hard-smitten Hollywood producer: "It is the face of a madonna."
Yeah, yeah, say some of his skeptical colleagues, but how will the U.S. moviegoer—who has been powerfully polarized to The Peroxide Ideal of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield—cotton to this refined new kind of stimulation? "That smile," one executive shuddered. "It doesn't arouse the cad in a man. It brings out the uncle." And another thing: Maria's earthy body makes a startling contrast to her heavenly face. From her father's side of the family she has inherited the chunky frame of a Swiss farm girl, with heavy hips and strapping thighs. Richard Brooks, who directed her in Karamazov, sums up: "She isn't the sort of girl who gives you sweaty palms."
"Real Womanliness." What Maria does give, according to Director Brooks, is something new to U.S. show business. Instead of North American sex, Maria has Central European Seele, which Brooks defines as a sort of spiritual dreaminess, interfused with girlish innocence and a tender maternal quality. They all add up to "real womanliness." Says Brooks: "Here for the first time on the screen the American man will see a woman who really understands him, who can give herself as American women have never learned to. This is the woman that American women long to be, and that American men are looking for."
Whatever her merits as a screen personality, Maria Schell is not universally liked by her fellow workers. Even in a business where professional jealousy is a strictly observed rule, she has inspired a surprising amount of viciously unflattering comment. A well-known French actor last week gritted: "I have never in my life hated a woman so much." A German director said: "I never think of that kleine Biest without wanting to slap her face." To the cast and crew of Une Vie, the French picture she has just finished shooting, she was openly known as "The Monster." A French director called her "one of the worst experiences of my life. In that sweet smile I see nothing but bared fangs. Inside the fairy princess is a witch."