Product Review

MAYERLING was the hugely-expensive television debut of the just-married Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer, broadcast once, live, over NBC on February 4, 1957. It was based on a true event which happened in Vienna in the late 1880s ... the Handsome Archduke Rudolph and his ill-fated love affair with the strikingly beautiful Countess Maria Vetsera. Archduke Rudolph, unhappy with his arranged marriage, is a classic drunken womanizing playboy, until he accidentally meets the young Maria Vetsera in Vienna's famed Prater Amusement Park. When she realizes he was the Archduke, and he realizes she was a Countess, the chance meeting blossoms into a clandestine romance that soon has all of Vienna gossiping. All the while, the Archduke's friendship with a liberal newspaper publisher had led his father to have him spied upon by the security services. He becomes despondent when his friend is again arrested, and his father demands that he break off his romance with the only person he has truly loved, failing which she will be banished to a convent. Realizing that neither wants to live without the other, the lovers enter into a murder/suicide pact, which culminates at the hunting lodge "Mayerling," outside Vienna, with both of their deaths. Can be played with or without the original commercials.

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