巴罗尼斯夫人出落得亭亭玉立的女儿麦瑞闯进鲁道夫王子的生活。在与麦瑞私奔的落脚行宫梅耶林，鲁道夫和麦瑞殉情自杀。鲁道夫王子所预言并一直设法避免的大战在1914年爆发。到1918年战争结束时，奥匈帝国的地图从此消失。　　精彩视点：　　奥匈帝国的历史和茜茜公主的风流艳史，不止一次地被电影人搬上大银幕，而茜茜公主的后人鲁道夫王子的传奇故事则鲜为人知。2006年出品的大型历史题材影片《王子传奇》，以厚重的历史文化、真实的人物故事、恢弘华丽的画面，讲述了鲁道夫王子纵情声色失意于政治的悲凉人生，再显奥匈帝国的没落。　　导演罗伯特·多恩海姆的作品大多有着厚重的历史文化背景，《西部风云》、《安妮日记》、《斯巴达克斯》等作品，无一不是以客观的历史镜头关注历史时代下的人物命运；而对于历史的理解和恢弘场面的掌控，则尽显罗伯特·多恩海姆导演的艺术功底。

The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich; his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.

A couple with a large blended family has grown apart. When the wife is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, their life breaks down and exposes neglected love.