When Pressburger suggested updating Strauss’ vintage operetta Die Fledermaus to the post-war Vienna of four-power occupation, he may have been inspired by Peter Ustinov’s 1951 play The Love of Four Colonels to recast the principal revellers as a Russian general, an American colonel and French and British captains, with the piece’s eponymous master of ceremonies, ‘the Bat’ Falke, now portrayed as an early virtuoso of Cold War gamesmanship. After Orson Welles withdrew, it is Anton Walbrook, with his authentic world-weary Viennese charm, and Michael Redgrave unforgettably dancing and singing, who steal the show. Designed by Hein Heckroth in post-Tales of Hoffmann rococo and shot by Christopher Challis in the still-new Cinemascope process, with minimal depth of field, Vienna is imagined as a chocolate-box confection insolently superimposed on the drab Europe of rationing and reconstruction – with some marvellous early ‘Scope gags almost as good as Tashlin’s in the contemporary and equally eccentric musical, The Girl Can’t Help It. Although poorly received on its release, its reputation has risen, and we may see behind the hectic gaiety and apprehension about the post-war world that even Walbrook’s diplomacy cannot hide.

Ian Christie