One of the truisms of Hollywood was that Josef Von Sternberg lost his muse when he and Marlene Dietrich parted creative company after The Devil Is A Woman. With Crime and Punishment between them, this next film is considered to be the biggest flop in his career. Mainly because Von Sternberg took on a light and airy Viennese operetta, the kind he probably grew up on in Europe.
I don't think the film flopped because it was so bad, it's dated, but other operettas and more well known ones date even more. However The King Steps Out made a mistake because too many people remembered Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary for good and for ill him dying exactly 20 years earlier. And about 20 years earlier his wife Empress Elizabeth also died and she was also remembered by a few.
What people remembered that beneath all this Viennese schmaltz, this was a story that did not have a happy ending. What we see in the film concerning Franz Josef and Elizabeth of Bavaria is true as far as it goes. It was a whirlwind courtship of sorts and the young Emperor did wind up marrying the younger sister after the Dowager Empress his mother arranged for the older sister.
In real life though after the honeymoon and Elizabeth presenting the Hapsburg Emperor with a son and seemingly settling the succession, the woman would not settle down. When you see the vivacious Elizabeth that Grace Moore gives us on the screen, that was the real Sissi. She would not settle down though and eventually the couple split and lived apart for the rest of their lives with Elizabeth leading a gay and carefree life at the various resorts and spas of 19th century Europe. She was assassinated by an anarchist. The reaction to her death was very much like that for Princess Diana, in fact there are a lot of parallels between Lady Diana Spencer and Elizabeth of Bavaria.
The image we have of Franz Joseph is that solemn man with the muttonchop whiskers and a stern countenance, the father of his people. Franz Joseph was always in fact a serious minded man. The character that Franchot Tone gives us just isn't the case, he was hardly that charming in real life. The Emperor certainly did get his battery plenty charged when Sissi was around and they were young and in love.
Grace Moore of course is in fine voice in the third of her films for Columbia and the first that didn't quite measure up to Harry Cohn's expectations. The score was written by violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler and Dorothy Fields and two of the songs Stars In My Eyes and The Old Refrain became concert standards for Grace Moore.
Harry Cohn gave Von Sternberg a wonderful cast of known supporting players to work with. Out of the group I liked Herman Bing, the only authentic German in the bunch. He gets a lot of laughs out of playing the flustered innkeeper whom everyone, royalty included, takes advantage of.
No happily ever after endings for Franz Joseph and Sissi and sad to say the audience knew it.
I don't think the film flopped because it was so bad, it's dated, but other operettas and more well known ones date even more. However The King Steps Out made a mistake because too many people remembered Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary for good and for ill him dying exactly 20 years earlier. And about 20 years earlier his wife Empress Elizabeth also died and she was also remembered by a few.
What people remembered that beneath all this Viennese schmaltz, this was a story that did not have a happy ending. What we see in the film concerning Franz Josef and Elizabeth of Bavaria is true as far as it goes. It was a whirlwind courtship of sorts and the young Emperor did wind up marrying the younger sister after the Dowager Empress his mother arranged for the older sister.
In real life though after the honeymoon and Elizabeth presenting the Hapsburg Emperor with a son and seemingly settling the succession, the woman would not settle down. When you see the vivacious Elizabeth that Grace Moore gives us on the screen, that was the real Sissi. She would not settle down though and eventually the couple split and lived apart for the rest of their lives with Elizabeth leading a gay and carefree life at the various resorts and spas of 19th century Europe. She was assassinated by an anarchist. The reaction to her death was very much like that for Princess Diana, in fact there are a lot of parallels between Lady Diana Spencer and Elizabeth of Bavaria.
The image we have of Franz Joseph is that solemn man with the muttonchop whiskers and a stern countenance, the father of his people. Franz Joseph was always in fact a serious minded man. The character that Franchot Tone gives us just isn't the case, he was hardly that charming in real life. The Emperor certainly did get his battery plenty charged when Sissi was around and they were young and in love.
Grace Moore of course is in fine voice in the third of her films for Columbia and the first that didn't quite measure up to Harry Cohn's expectations. The score was written by violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler and Dorothy Fields and two of the songs Stars In My Eyes and The Old Refrain became concert standards for Grace Moore.
Harry Cohn gave Von Sternberg a wonderful cast of known supporting players to work with. Out of the group I liked Herman Bing, the only authentic German in the bunch. He gets a lot of laughs out of playing the flustered innkeeper whom everyone, royalty included, takes advantage of.
No happily ever after endings for Franz Joseph and Sissi and sad to say the audience knew it.