Willi Forst’s second film as a direc­tor is often described as his best work as well as one of the supreme masterpieces of Austrian cinema. At the very least, Maskerade can be seen as the singular high-watermark of the most Austrian of film genres: the so called “Viennese Film”, a series of hit movies, produced between the late 1920s and the 1950s, which were set in Habsburg-era Vienna, mixing comedy with melodrama and es­tablishing a characteristic tone of nostal­gic sentimentality.
The extremely clever script, written by frequent Forst collaborator Walter Reisch, imagines a joyous breakdown of the libidinous architecture of Austrian high society. The starting point is a nude painting of an unknown beauty. Pressed to reveal the identity of his model, the painter Heideneck (Adolf Wohlbrück) invents a woman: Miss Dur. By chance, there exists only a single person in Vien­na with this name. And so Leopoldine Dur (Paula Wessely), a naive, innocent and of course extremely charming do­mestic worker, becomes the centre of a sprawling romantic intrigue. Stylishly shot by director of photogra­phy Franz Planer, who later worked with Max Ophüls and Nicholas Ray, much of the film’s success can be attributed to in­spired casting and the highly controlled performances Forst managed to get out of his cast. Paula Wessely, already a fa­mous stage actress, made her screen de­but in Maskerade and went on become one of the most successful film actresses in Austria and Germany for decades to come. For the male lead, meanwhile, Forst wanted to cast Rudolf Forster. Ad­olf Wohlbrück (who moved to the United Kingdom after the advent of Nazism and changed his name to Anton Walbrook), though, proved to be a more than ade­quate replacement and should be cele­brated, today, as the ultimate embodi­ment of Forst’s vision of urbane, elegant and slightly world-weary masculinity.

Lukas Foerster