I have only seen the first part of this two part TV-film, but as nobody has written a review yet I will be the first. I live in Vienna and know the hotel Sacher quite well, so I was really looking forward to it. Unfortunately the film tells very little about Anna Sacher, the legendary director of the hotel, and concentrates on some rather uninteresting fictional characters: a editor couple from Berlin and an Austrian count and his wife who is a secret writer. In between is the weird story about a girl who is kept as a prisoner in the cellar of the opera - a mixture of the Phantom of the Opera and the story of Natascha Kampusch.
I was glad that on the same evening the Austrian television showed the documentary film "The queen of Vienna" about Anna Sacher, who was indeed a fascinating person. A butcher's daughter who after a long struggle becomes the first female director of a European top hotel. A close friend of the high-society and the cultural world when Vienna was one most of the most thrilling places in the world, a pioneer of equal treatment for women and a sworn enemy of Vienna's notorious antisemitic mayor Karl Lueger. Even Anna Sacher's personal was full of drama. As her great love was already married she made her daughter of fifteen marry his son. When she was 20 this daughter committed suicide.
I was not very enthusiastic about the actors either. Ursula Strauss has very little in common with of the real Anna Sacher and Nina Proll plays the imperial mistress Katherina Schratt like a cheap slut. I can't understand how Robert Dornhelm could make such a bad film about such a good theme.
