If you can overlook the bad dubbing and sometimes barebones production values (a dragon toward the end is particularly unfortunate), this is a completely charming version of the familiar tale. It was filmed on the grounds of an actual palace in Austria, and the director also plays the King. All of the actors are convincing and committed to their roles,never "playing down" to the material or snickering at it in a shared joke with the audience, as so often happens in our more cynical era. Among the more atmospheric scenes: the young queen's meeting with the wicked fairy early on; the exodus of the twelve good fairies from the depths of the lake; the wicked fairy putting the whole palace to sleep, and so on. This film manages to capture a naive sense of "long ago and far away" that is wholly and distressingly absent from more recent attempts at live-action fairy tales, like Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre and the lamentable Golan-Globus productions, which substitute modern-day smart-aleckiness and prosaic scripts for the true magic that films have always been capable of. This film was one of a series based on the better-known Grimm's tales that was filmed in West Germany in the 1950's, which perhaps accounts for the less-than-sumptuous settings; post-war Germany was not exactly overflowing with "filthy lucre". For those who like a little magic and poetry with their fairy tales, however, these films are just what the doctor ordered. They are available from amazon deutschland on Region 2 DVDs, but I don't think they are subtitled.
