Mayerling

Anatole Litvak was a Russian Jewish writer in the avant-garde theater of the early revolutionary period in the Soviet Union, eventually getting involved in the film industry there. He slipped out of the country in 1925, it’s not clear exactly how, and ended up directing films at UFA, the big German studio that was the home of Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau and many others. He made a few films that were hits there, but when Hitler came to power in 1933, Litvak fled to Paris, where he enjoyed a moderate success for awhile. Then in 1936 he directed the film…