Wiener Film

Willi Forst's production Leise flehen meine Lieder, a biography of Franz Schubert, was so successful that an English-language version was made, under the title Unfinished Symphony.

These films were admittedly also very popular in Germany, but the departure from the milieu of Vienna with its people and characteristic speech resulted in the loss of the distinctive atmosphere of the Austrian originals.

Ophüls very carefully evoked the atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Vienna, while not neglecting to throw into sharp relief the hollow concepts of honour of that period.

The film critic Frieda Grafe once described it as "German made fluid, which makes the listener realise that speech is a matrix of tone which can bring forth meaning simply by the impression of its sound long before it becomes communication in the strict sense".

[2] The dialect's many possibilities of expression, the precision, rapidity and fluid formulation of speech come close to the idiosyncratic verbal wit of American screwball comedy.

Besides affairs from the social life of the period of the monarchy, Wiener Filme also occasionally dealt with more remote history, generally in the form of biographies of famous people, predominantly musicians and composers.

Set shortly before World War I, this film deals powerfully with a number of Austrian and Prussian characters whose assumptions about life are disrupted by a romantic drama.

The film is distinguished in that it is set against the economic crisis of 1922 in Vienna, which is not only evoked but, especially through the acting of Paula Wessely as a desperately impoverished student of commercial art, elevated into a moving psychological portrayal of Viennese double standards and hypocrisy.

Other highlights of the genre include Paul Fejos' masterpiece, Sonnenstrahl (1933) in the style of Poetic realism, and several of Willi Forst's films, among them the hugely successful Maskerade of 1934/35.