E-Mail This Article to a Friend Forgotten but not lost The cinematic faces of Romy Schneider BY CHRIS FUJIWARA

Unless they were avid filmgoers in the ’60s and ’70s, Americans are probably less than acutely aware of who Romy Schneider was. But in Europe, 21 years after her death at age 43, Schneider is part of the pantheon of tragic female celebrity, a figure with a mythic status comparable to that of Marilyn Monroe. At least 25 books on her are in print. She is, then, certifiably worthy of the two-month tribute in which five other Boston-area organizations have joined with the Goethe Institut-Boston. Fortunately, she managed to appear in some good films and a few great ones.

Germany and France both claim the Vienna-born actress as their own, for two different bodies of work. In Germany, Schneider is durably linked with "Sissi," Empress Elisabeth of Austria, whom she played as an adolescent in three popular confections of the ’50s. In France, she is probably best known for her quintet of hits with director Claude Sautet in the ’70s, films so expressive of a certain French self-image that they may be as much objects of national pride as the Sissi films.

But the three films that are perhaps Schneider’s best are markedly international. They also happen to be underrated. Orson Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that The Trial (1962; at the Harvard Film Archive September 12 at 7 p.m. and September 29 at 9 p.m.), though a French-German co-production shot partly in Zagreb, was "a very personal expression, and it’s not at all true that I’m off in some foreign world that has no application to myself. It’s the most autobiographical movie that I’ve ever made, the only one that’s really close to me." In this brilliant adaptation of Kafka’s novel, Schneider plays Leni, the nurse/receptionist/mistress of the formidable Advocate (Welles) from whom Joseph K. (Anthony Perkins) seeks help in moving his case through the courts. Leni, who "finds all accused men attractive," is an image of tireless lasciviousness, luring K. to a storeroom to dally on top of bundles of old paper, showing off her webbed hand as an added erotic attraction, darting around the Advocate’s bed while giving another of his clients (Akim Tamiroff) whispered tips on groveling. The childlike impulsiveness with which Schneider imbues the character is a vivid sign of the absence of restraint that characterizes the film’s corrupt dreamworld.

Both sprawling and meditative, Otto Preminger’s forgotten The Cardinal (1963; at the Harvard Film Archive September 20 at 7 p.m. and September 26 at 7 p.m.) spans two continents and 22 years (1917 to 1939) in its account of the rise of a Boston priest (Tom Tryon, whose repressed performance gradually makes more sense). Schneider appears, disappears, then reappears during the film’s episodic narrative, playing a Viennese woman who has a brief and unconsummated fling with the hero during a leave of absence from the priesthood. She gives a great performance (Louis Skorecki, writing in the Paris daily Libération earlier this month, called it her best role) and is central to two of its outstanding sequences: a ball scene in which the Panavision camera makes the hero’s alienation achingly visible, until she reprieves him by asking him to dance; and a prison confession with which the film movingly brings the curtain down on the pre-war past.

That Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig (1972) has had a checkered career can be appreciated from the circumstance that the Schneider series will show it in two different forms: an Italian-language version (at the Boston Public Library, in two parts, the first on September 22 at 6 p.m. and the second on September 29 at 6 p.m.) and a recut English-language version (at the Harvard Film Archive, in one part, September 14 at 7 p.m. and September 19 at 9 p.m.). In any language, most viewers have rejected Visconti’s portrait of the ill-fated King Ludwig II of Bavaria (a remote and petulant Helmut Berger) as opulent boredom or high camp, or both. But the film has a marvelous softness and beauty; under Armando Nannuzzi’s lighting, everything gleams, and the lushness is perfectly controlled, supporting Visconti’s chilling vision of the decline of a romantic æsthete.

Early in Ludwig, Schneider’s Empress Elisabeth advises the hero: "Sovereigns like us are immaterial. We’re just figureheads. They’ll soon forget us, unless they give us a little consequence by assassinating us." Nothing like this could have come from the mouth of this woman as Schneider played her 17 years earlier in the idyllic Sissi (1955; at the Harvard Film Archive, September 19 at 7 p.m. and September 21 at 9 p.m.). Filmed in old-postcard hues in an Agfacolor already obsolete in 1955, Sissi is an overlit storybook in which contourless caricatures roam too-large sets made out of white chocolate. Galaxies away from Visconti’s suppleness, Ernst Marischka’s stodgy mise-en-scène devotes itself to an uncomplicated exposition of the myth of an irrepressible child of the woods raised suddenly to empire. Although she can’t transcend the level of symbolic abstraction where the film is pitched, Schneider manages to be not cloying, partly through the judicious display of underarm hair during Sissi’s Danube processional (compare Schneider’s moustache in The Trial).

Fleeing both the Sissi persona and a German film industry that had little better to offer her, Schneider became an international star, though no exception to the rule that since World War II no actress from continental Europe has become a top-rank star in the United States (Sophia Loren came closest). Neither did she find any place in the insurgent art cinema of the ’60s, for which she may have felt an antipathy: she was more comfortable with cosmopolitan father figures like Welles and Preminger, and she lacked the independence from the camera implied by Anna Karina in Godard’s films, Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s, and even Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut’s. Schneider was more like Marlene Dietrich: someone who loved being admired by a camera and who repaid its worship with charm, sensuality, and intelligence.

Schneider’s time came later. Les choses de la vie/The Things of Life (1970; at the French Library September 11 at 8 p.m. and at the Harvard Film Archive September 13 at 7 p.m. and September 15 at 9 p.m.), Claude Sautet’s breakthrough film, concerns a car accident that befalls a French architect (Michel Piccoli). Spiraling around this central event, which Sautet films in dazzling slow motion, the narrative retraces the hero’s previous-day rupture with his girlfriend (Schneider). Revealing Sautet as a director of great skill, Les choses sets the tone for his work throughout the ’70s: in film after film, he documents the pleasures of French bourgeois life in scenes of friends and families getting together and in narratives that celebrate the durability of ties among members of small but diverse social groups. His male characters, played by such icons as Piccoli and Yves Montand, are likable despite being narcissistic and in flight from an emotional reality to which their women (usually Schneider) keep trying to recall them.

The four later Sautet-Schneider films will screen at the French Library. She plays a prostitute in the entertaining Max et les ferrailleurs (1971; September 18 at 8 p.m., without subtitles). César et Rosalie (1972; September 25 at 8 p.m.), with Montand, is profound about a whole subtle relationship zone: the mutual expectation of misunderstanding that causes people to give up talking to each other. In the brooding Mado (1976; October 2 at 8 p.m.), perhaps the director’s best film, Schneider has a superb cameo as the hero’s alcoholic former lover. Finally, in Une histoire simple/A Simple Story (1978; October 9 at 8 p.m.), Schneider becomes a feminist heroine, undergoing an untragic abortion at the beginning of the film and, at the end, having decided to have the child with whom she next becomes pregnant, turning her back on her lover to form a ménage with a widowed female friend.

This is the real crown of Schneider’s career, and not the wretched film with which she ended it, Jacques Rouffio’s La passante du Sans-Souci/The Passerby (1982; September 12 at 9 p.m. and September 15 at 7 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive; October 15 at 7 p.m. at the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University; and, without subtitles, October 23 at 8 p.m. at the French Library), which contrives to be not only plodding and toneless but also insulting and absurd in its TV-movie-like examination of why a human-rights advocate (Piccoli) killed a former Nazi. Schneider looks ravaged (her son had died shortly before the shooting), and there’s something pathetic in the spectacle of a marvelous actress giving her all to a film that exists only to exploit her.