Cinema: Pact

When 18-year-old Charlotte Matthiesen told her 16-year-old sweetheart, Donald Carroll, that she was pregnant, they went to a cinema to talk it over. There the feature film, Mayerling (TIME, Sept. 20), in its tragic story of the death pact of Archduke Rudolf of Austria and the young Baroness Marie Vetsera, offered a better solution than anything their frantic minds could think of. So Donald got his father’s pistol, shot Charlotte dead, but lost his nerve when it came to killing himself. Last week a New York murder trial jury heard this story, after almost three hours’ deliberation found Donald “not guilty by reason of insanity.”