A pretty conventional tale based on a novella by Felix Salten depicting a pigtailed young innocent abroad in the Big Bad City. In the case of Little Veronika the city is Vienna, as immortalised by Carol Reed twenty years later in 'The Third Man' as "the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm".
As soon as Veronika gets off the train from an idyllically portrayed rural Tyrol, she's straight away being visibly sized up by all and sundry (starting with three butch looking women outside her aunt's digs) as fresh fruit ripe for picking. Her extremely worldly-looking Aunt Rosie - evidently living well on the wages of sin - takes Veronika and the audience on a whirlwind tour of late 20's Vienna (including a shot of the famous ferris wheel at the entrance of the Prater amusement park where Holly Martins later had his meeting with Harry Lime) before the action settles upon a decadent-looking joint full of hand-kissing middle-aged men in black tie eyeing the comely Veronika.
SPOILER COMING: In a film running only 70 minutes nearly an hour has already elapsed and Veronika still hasn't been ruined yet by the usual brilliantined cad naïve young heroines always encounter in these films. Instead she apparently scandalises Auntie Rosie and her creepy friends by spending a night with one of the men she meets because they'd taken a liking to each other rather than as the sort of financial transaction Auntie was presumably more comfortable with. So it's back on the train home, and an ending dependent upon one of those coincidences so beloved of silent films.
As soon as Veronika gets off the train from an idyllically portrayed rural Tyrol, she's straight away being visibly sized up by all and sundry (starting with three butch looking women outside her aunt's digs) as fresh fruit ripe for picking. Her extremely worldly-looking Aunt Rosie - evidently living well on the wages of sin - takes Veronika and the audience on a whirlwind tour of late 20's Vienna (including a shot of the famous ferris wheel at the entrance of the Prater amusement park where Holly Martins later had his meeting with Harry Lime) before the action settles upon a decadent-looking joint full of hand-kissing middle-aged men in black tie eyeing the comely Veronika.
SPOILER COMING: In a film running only 70 minutes nearly an hour has already elapsed and Veronika still hasn't been ruined yet by the usual brilliantined cad naïve young heroines always encounter in these films. Instead she apparently scandalises Auntie Rosie and her creepy friends by spending a night with one of the men she meets because they'd taken a liking to each other rather than as the sort of financial transaction Auntie was presumably more comfortable with. So it's back on the train home, and an ending dependent upon one of those coincidences so beloved of silent films.
