Les jeunes années d'une reine

In between saving the Austro-Hungarian Empire for her screen husband as Sissi, Romy Schneider took the time out to rule Great Britain in her own right. Here she humbly but effortlessly wins the hearts of all (except for her controlling mother, of course) with her fearless determination to read newspapers and do the right thing.

In order to put her off from interfering too much with their running things, her ministers decide to marry her off to Prince Albert, whom she has never met; she objects, as does Albert. Fortunately, G*d watches over fools and constitutional monarchs, and they are both hiding out in the slums of Windsor, where rough seafaring men play Stephen Foster tunes. It's a place they can meet cute and fall in love without interfering with the fiction that this was anything but a love-match in any version of reality.

It's another of the cream-puff costume dramas that Ernst Marischka wrote and directed Miss Schneider in. Here, various high-class locations around Vienna stand in for various high-class locations around Britain. The Austrian audiences must have lapped up the luxury after the devastation of two world wars over forty years.