Waltzes from Vienna (Tom Arnold Films, Gainsborough Pictures, Gaumont-British, 1933, released 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

With an early afternoon unexpectedly free, today (Friday, April 5) my husband Charles and I watched a quite good movie on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlNRL4GOyiI): Waltzes from Vienna (1933), legendary as the one at least sort-of musical directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Though I’d never actually seen this film before, I’ve mentioned it to fellow film buffs, who’ve generally reacted with astonishment: “Alfred Hitchcock … made a musical?” It’s a film Hitchcock dissed even while he was making it; though it was shot at the Gaumont-British studio headed by Michael Balcon, it was produced by an independent filmmaker, Tom Arnold, who not only rented space at the Gaumont-British lot but borrowed the company’s top star, Jessie Matthews, for the female lead. When Hitchcock was shooting Waltzes from Vienna Michael Balcon dropped by the set to see how he was doing. Hitchcock lamented to the studio head, “I hate this sort of stuff. Melodrama is the only sort of thing I can do.” Balcon got the message; he immediately offered Hitchcock a contract and green-lighted as his next film the first The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), an enormous hit which “typed” Hitchcock as a suspense-thriller director for the rest of his career. Hitchcock was at a very low career ebb when he made Waltzes from Vienna: he’d started out as an assistant director at Balcon’s studio and he’d just begun to build a reputation as a director with three Balcon productions – The Lodger (1926), Downhill (1927) and Easy Virtue (1927). Then John Maxwell offered Hitchcock more money than Balcon could afford to pay him, and he jumped ship to Maxwell’s studio, British International – where he spent an unhappy five years and made only three films with real distinction: Blackmail (1929), Murder! (1930) and the awesome Rich and Strange (1931). After the financial failure of Rich and Strange, Maxwell gave Hitchcock just one more assignment – a pretty tacky stage play called Number Seventeen – and then fired him.

Tom Arnold was the only producer who offered Hitchcock a job, and he took on this adaptation of a hit stage musical called Walzer aus Wien by Maria Willner, Heinz Reichert and Ernst Marischka. It was a bio-musical about Johann Strauss, Jr. (Esmond Knight) and his father, Johann Strauss, Sr. (Edmund Gwenn in a decidedly non-Santa Claus-ish role), and it dealt with Strauss Vater’s insistence that Strauss Sohn not pursue a musical career. It also showed Strauss, Jr. involved in a romantic relationship with a decidedly fictional character, Resi Ebezeder (Jessie Matthews), daughter of a Viennese baker (Robert Hale), while Strauss, Jr. is also being vamped by Countess Helga von Stahl (Fay Compton), whose jealous husband Prince Gustav (Frank Vosper) keeps falling asleep and dreaming of defending his wife’s honor in a duel. The same plot was remade in the U.S. by MGM as The Great Waltz (1938), with French actor Fernand Gravet as Johann Strauss, Jr. and Luise Rainer as his love interest, renamed “Poldi Vogelhuber.” (I suspect it was competition from the MGM film that led the distributors at Gaumont-British to retitle this one Strauss’s Great Waltz.) From all the nasty things Hitchcock said about it over the years, including telling fellow director François Truffaut in 1966 it was “the lowest ebb of my career,” Waltzes from Vienna actually turned out to be a quite good film, sophisticated and charming, more of a screwball comedy (with overtones of slapstick) than a musical. It was adapted as a screenplay by Guy Bolton and Alma Reville (Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock), and they not only deleted the original songs, adapted from Strauss’s music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (a formidable name in the history of film music) and Julius Bittner, they also changed the ending. In the stage version, Resi the baker’s daughter decides that her co-worker Joseph (called “Leopold” in the film and played by Hindel Elgar) would be a better long-term mate for her than Strauss; in the film Resi and Strauss settle their quarrels and end up in the proverbial clinch.

We knew we were in for something special from the very first shot, a bugle emblazoned with the logo of the Vienna Fire Department leading a band playing Johann Strauss, Sr.’s ”Radetzky March” (which we’re used to hearing only at the very end of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concerts) while a fire crew marches off to fight a fire at the Ebezeder bakery. Upstairs from the bakery Johann Strauss, Jr. is giving Resi a music lesson, and Strauss and a dedicated firefighter have a fight over who’s going to have the honor of rescuing her. Resi seems more concerned about saving Strauss’s song than her own life. Meanwhile, Countess von Stahl is writing a poem about the Danube River which she wants to turn into a song, and when she has a chance to hear Strauss, Jr. play she decides he’s the composer he wants for her poem (and for a few other things as well). The Countess asks her husband for help with some of the lines, and when she comes up with “blue” as a color for the Danube, he replies, “The Danube has never been blue in all its history!” (This became a bizarre international joke in the 1970’s when the Danube had become horrendously polluted and was essentially a greyish-brown soup of toxic waste. Fortunately the governments of the countries along the Danube got together and cleaned it up.) The Countess works with music publisher Anton Drexler (Marcus Barron) to sneak “The Blue Danube” onto the program of a concert Strauss’s father is supposed to conduct at the St. Stephen’s festival. Drexler turns back the hands of Strauss, Sr.’s watch so Strauss, Sr. will be late and Strauss, Jr. can assume his position as head of the Strauss family orchestra and conduct “The Blue Danube” at its world premiere. Strauss, Jr. takes his place at the podium even though he’s sure it will cost him Resi – she’s made it clear that their relationship is contingent on Strauss abandoning music and taking his position as the next in line to inherit Ebezeder’s bakery – but when he’s finished conducting “The Blue Danube” (and we see it’s a success because many of the couples at the party are waltzing to it on screen), he immediately tears off to his place because Leopold has (falsely) told him Resi has gone there.

The Countess, her husband and Resi all converge there and, while it’s not exactly a duel, the husband and Strauss have a fist fight over the Countess’s honor. Ultimately it all turns out the way you’ve thought all along it would: Strauss (nicknamed “Schani” for some reason) and Resi pair up, Prince Gustav and the Countess reconcile, and Strauss goes on to a great musical career. Audiences in 1933 were probably disappointed that Jessie Matthews didn’t get any of the big dance numbers she was famous for, but Waltzes from Vienna is a real charmer, not only a fascinating road-not-taken for Alfred Hitchcock but a great movie in its own right and one that definitely deserves to be better known (along with such other underrated Hitchcocks as Rich and Strange, Under Capricorn and I Confess). The big revelation of Waltzes from Vienna is just how much of a sense of humor Hitchcock had; while his fans are familiar with the quite amusing comic-relief scenes with which he studded his thrillers, Waltzes from Vienna proves that Hitchcock could have been an excellent screwball comedy director if he’d chosen to pursue that path. He did make one more screwball comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith – an assignment he took after he moved to the U.S. in 1940, mainly because Carole Lombard wanted to work with him and she was then such a huge star he wasn’t about to say no to her – but my memories of Mr. and Mrs. Smith is that it wasn’t a very good movie and hardly on the level of Waltzes from Vienna.