"Proud of my achievements? Being humble is all that is left to me in this.
This is a real find, that I'd never heard of till today, and which feels very much like a lost Max Ophuls confection, with the viennese setting and the dashing Anton Walbrook (the narrator of Ophuls' masterpiece La Ronde) in the lead as "Vienna's most elegant man". The photography is distinctive and insightful - the camera seems to see more than it should - and many moving images stay emblazoned on the mind much more like still photographs.
What a timeless confection of romance and scandal. It's as if I can smell the perfume clinging to the gowns as they fall to the art studio floor, feel the nap of the chinchilla muff, daub the flushed skin of a bourgeois wife's figure just released from the bones on a tight corset, thrill to her gay call for more champagne--all immersed in pale 'fin de siecle' lamp light.
I cannot agree at all with the reviewer who wrote that he had seen thousands of films and that this one is the best. "Maskerade" or "Masquerade in Vienna" is an Austrian German-language film from 1934, so this one is already over 80 years old and it is from the early days of sound films still.
Most reviews by IMDB members of this film are ecstatic and with very good reason. This must surely be director Willy Forst's greatest achievement.
The fact that any reviewer here can give it more than 2 stars proves they are fake reviews implanted by the studio.This slasher flick isn't gouge your eyes out horrible but it's only worth seeing to laugh at how the slasher genre is.
Watched this on Netflix the other day - Those who compare them it to Friday the 13th are dead on - killer is mad because people killed h is mom and so he is now getting revenge.but some other comparisons might be made - first, this film definitely has elements of Texas Chainsaw Massacre - in that the killer is deformed and is putting on masks of human skin.
With a poll coming up on IMDbs Classic Film board for the best films of 1934,I started to search around a DVD sellers page for forgotten movies from the year.With having strong memories of seeing Anton Walbrook in the excellent The Red Shoes & The Queen of Spades,I was thrilled to spot a title that Walbrook had filmed in Germany in 1934,which led to me getting ready to take the maskerade off.
Not quite what the legend surrounding it would lead you to believe, "Maskerade" is a quite predictable movie in a Schnitzlerian mode, stylistically akin to any of a number of better Max Ophuls movies of its time (e.g.
