Zeus

The Red Danube (1949)

• Director
  • George Sidney
• Writers
  • Gina Kaus(screen play)
  • Arthur Wimperis(screen play)
  • Bruce Marshall(novel "Vespers in Vienna")
• Stars
  • Walter Pidgeon
  • Ethel Barrymore
  • Peter Lawford

  One of the more palatable of Hollywood's anti-communist tracts of the late 1940s-early 1950s was MGM's The Red Danube. Janet Leigh plays Maria Buhlen, an Eastern Bloc ballerina who seeks political asylum in the British-occupied zone of Vienna. Maria's plight turns into a political tug-of-war involving a British colonel (Walter Pidgeon) and a Soviet colonel (Louis Calhern). Their ideological hagglings spill over into spiritualism, as represented by Mother Superior Ethel Barrymore, and romance, as personified by Maria's ardent suitor Major John McPhimister (Peter Lawford). Like earlier anti-Red cinematic exercises, The Red Danube failed to connect at the box office.