Any serious study of Austrian director/actor Willi Forst is a welcome one. The neglect of Forst has been symptomatic of the relative lack of attention paid to Austrian film history both at home and abroad. This has changed in the last two decades with the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers and scholars who find both national and international importance in Vienna's film production. Of course, many Austrian filmmakers moved to Berlin or even to Hollywood under the threat of Nazism. This is not to say that Golden Age film production in Vienna lacked world-class talents. Willi Forst should rank among the top European filmmakers of the mid twentieth century as Vienna's most authentic auteur. Unfortunately, his experimentalism and metafilmic concepts remain largely unexamined given the usual relegation of his film work as opulent period escapism.

Francesco Bono's attempt to separate the popular image of Forst as a leading man from the even more successful director succeeds in conveying his importance to the creation of Austrian film in the 1930s. The Viennese Film, an early sound style turned genre that Forst developed with writer/director Walter Reisch, became synonymous with Austrian national cinema after the end of the silent era. Its heady mix of period melodrama set in Vienna, classical music, stylized cinematography, brash editing, and themes that often pitted love against the creative impulse and sacrifice, was an international sensation. Hollywood recreated and imitated them from the Schubert film of 1932 into the late 1940s. In addition to articulating the influence of René Clair on Forst (there were presumably others and a discussion on this subject is necessary), Bono examines Forst both as a symbolist and through his Metadiskursivität—that is, the theory that his films do not open a window to life but rather act and comment on it. Moreover, Forst's very semiotic structure in visual and narrative construction tends toward the circle or the spiral. Bono reads this as a reference to the waltz, arguing that Forst's films avoid linear development and even take on three-quarter time rhythm in editing and plotting.

Bono discusses at length the two music-films Allotria and Mazurka, which Forst made in Berlin but aimed directly at Hollywood. Universal Studios offered him a contract once his extended projects at UFA were complete. Forst returned to Vienna, and Bono's examination of Forst under the Anschluss attempts to sort out the various interpretations of Forst's continuation of the Viennese Film and comedy-melodramas dealing with the film world (in Frauen sind keine Engel) as part of Goebbels' mission for production in Vienna. But the director's theoretical and aesthetic aspects might have been utilized more effectively here to clarify the extent of Forst's political conformity. Bono considers Forst's escapism “ideologisch gefärbt” (172) because it was in the interest of National Socialism to distort and negate history with the use of the operetta film. Nevertheless, Bono gives credence to the argument that Forst's Viennese films from this period deliver a form of gentle subversion in showing a Biedermeier Austria that undermines the National Socialist program of a Pan-Germanic cultural landscape. Indeed, the very metatheatrical structure of these films reflects on the staging of life under National Socialism.

Following the war, Forst tried and failed to lure significant Austrian film exiles back to Vienna, whose film industry boomed during the 1950s despite the lack of national funding or recognition of the art with the provincial Heimatfilm and the lavish color “imperial film” (e.g., Ernst Marischka's Sissi trilogy and Franz Antel's Kaiserwalzer series). Forst's experiments were now both ahead of and behind the times. Unwilling to go the neorealist route, which he found ugly, Forst attempted to meld his stylized elegance with controversial subject matter. In Die Sünderin (which could only be made in West Germany and not in Catholic Austria), Forst again found an affinity with Hollywood—in this case, with the stylized social-sexual melodramas of German-born Douglas Sirk. Such attempts to develop his style met with hostility at the box office, and his resulting final films were seemingly made-to-order for audiences that now wanted his nostalgia rather than his art. These were, however, visually stunning and theoretically fascinating examples of what the press noted was the product of the director's exhaustion.

Bono provides fascinating examinations of these neglected final films in which Forst deconstructs genres and furthers the theoretical thrust of his oeuvre. Although Wien, Du Stadt meiner Träume (1957) has been misunderstood as a frothy “hymn to the city” by critics unwilling to tolerate an experimental Forst, Bono sees in it a critical attempt to remove from Vienna its 1950s film tourist clichés. Although not directly demythologizing the city as the French New Wave would do with Paris, Forst's world-as-theater concept ultimately underscores Vienna's self-reference as an illusion, even in its role as the realistic grounding to a fantasy film. While Bono does not examine Forst's influences on other cinemas and filmmakers after the 1930s, one can easily discern a French reception of Forst's deconstruction of the romantic film and his influence in and beyond Hollywood's Silver Age films.

Willi Forst: Ein Filmkritisches Porträt manages successfully to break free of the biographical truisms found in most texts on Forst, and its attempt to tease out and examine perceptive sociocritical and film-philosophical concepts underpinning some of the most visually striking dominant cinema to come out of midcentury Europe is valuable. The book is well illustrated and while internet sources are curiously avoided, Bono provides a complete filmography and a painstakingly researched bibliography on the director and on published reviews of his films. If translated into English, this work would be useful for the current study of transnational filmmaking and of Austrian cinema and German-language film in particular. It is a very readable and succinct study that will hopefully open a new “stage” for Forst scholarship and recognition.