[In the following essay, Sarris defends Ophuls's stature as a major filmmaker of the twentieth century.]

One problem with culturally ambitious film criticism is its straining for analogies between cinema and the other arts when, in fact, cinema is not only analogous to the other arts, but swallows them whole in the process. What is mise-en-scène in cinema? The apostles of mise-enscène may argue that mise-en-scène is to cinema as music is to opera. But what happens to this neat analogy between cinematic mise-en-scène and operatic music when we consider the fact that so-called "background" music plays such a crucial role in most movies? The metaphorical music of images must then compete with the actual music of the spheres in the viewing (and hearing) experience. I believe that Max Ophuls' understood this problem throughout his career and I believe further that Ophuls has been seriously underrated precisely because of his perceptiveness.

Even such a dedicated Ophuls admirer as Claude Beylie falls into the trap of irrelevant culture-mongering by remarking: "All his life, Ophuls adored Mozart, but he chose the music of Oscar Straus for his films. All his life he read Balzac and Stendahl, but he never dared adapt them for the screen. All his life, Goethe, the poet and dramatist, was his favorite author, but only once did he try to film a work by Goethe, and then he felt that he made a mess of it."

Richard Roud quotes Beylie (in Roud's 1958 British Film Institute Index) approvingly on this occasion to support Roud's overall contention that Ophuls was merely a "beloved minor master" with a weakness for "novelettish" subjects. Of Ophuls' fondness for Mozart there can be little doubt. Anton Walbrook's King of Bavaria in Lola Montes complains that his deafness prevents him from hearing Mozart's gentle melodiousness, which he prefers to the deafening din of Wagner. Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio is performed at the beginning of Liebelei. Most curious of all Ophulsian hommages to Mozart occurs in Letter from an Unknown Woman with a performance of The Magic Flute in Italian!

Even so, Ophuls does not employ Mozart as incessantly in the background as, say, Agnes Varda does in Le Bonheur or as Bo Widerberg does in Elvira Madigan. Does that fact make Le Bonheur and Elvira Madigan more tasteful and more profound than La Ronde and Madame de . . . with their tinkling Straus waltzes? I think not. What Ophuls has perceived is that Mozart's music, taken out of the classical contexts of its own sublimity, would serve as a cultural crutch rather than as an aesthetic adjunct to his scenarios. As a romantic artist, Ophuls chose to admire Mozart's classical serenity without exploiting it inappropriately. Also, Mozart's music is already part of the artistic heritage of La Belle Epoque, and, as such, cannot pursue Ophulsian characters outside the opera houses and concert halls within which their destinies are foretold as by the seers of Greek Tragedy. Indeed, it is the very indecorum of interrupted musical performances in Madame de and Letter from an Unknown Woman which prefigures the ultimate downfall of the Ophulsian heroines.

That Ophuls himself did not place an inflated cultural price tag on his achievement does not in itself make him less worthy than other more self-satisfied directors—any more than Mozart's relative modesty vis à vis Beethoven makes him less sublime, bombastic music critics like Bernard Shaw to the contrary notwithstanding. At the very least, Ophuls is incomparable in the sense that he is completely unlike any other director. His detractors may prefer Mizoguchi or Renoir or Ford or Hitchcock or Keaton or Chaplin or Hawks or Sternberg or Dreyer or Rossellini or Lubitsch or Lang or Buñuel or Bresson or Welles or Vigo or Griffith or Murnau or Eisenstein or Dovzhenko or Pudovkin or Pabst or Bergman or Fellini or Antonioni or Visconti or Godard or Chabrol or Truffaut or Resnais or Kurosawa or Ozu or Becker or Cocteau or Vidor or Ray, Satyajit or Ray, Nicholas or Sirk or Stroheim, but no one can say that Ophuls is a minor-league version of someone more major. To denigrate Ophuls it is necessary to invent an anti-Ophuls, an imaginary creature who would have treated Schnitzler and De Maupassant with more bitterness and less sweetness, with more syphilis and less circularity, and, ultimately, with more literary fidelity and less cinematic fluidity. Perhaps, the one unpardonable Ophulsian sin for his detractors has been a life-long demonstration of the limitations of mise-en-scène on the screen. If your favorite picture is Potemkin or Man of Aran or The Bicycle Thief or Grand Illusion or The Grapes of Wrath or comparable works possessing all the literary nuance and sensibility of a stone tablet on Mount Sinai, it is easy enough to overcompensate for this relative primitivism of the cinematic sensibility by repairing to the book shelf to find characters with more cultivated idiosyncrasies, and plots with more calculated intrigues. It is then even possible to imagine future adaptations of Proust and James with all their ironies intact on the screen. And then Ophuls comes along to spoil everything with his intimations of stylistic irrevocability, of the inability of characters to twist and turn and deceive and dissemble and turn back once the massive machinery of the cinema has set them into motion on their journeys into time within a rectangular frame. The most idiosyncratic characters from the printed page become archetypal on the screen, and the room for moral maneuver more severely restricted. Hence, the eternal complaint in highbrow circles that the movie is cornier than the book, or more optimistic, or more emotional. For Ophuls, the process of story simplification is a stylistic necessity. The point of his art is to reveal rather than to conceal, to surround rather than to surprise, to produce an aura of inevitability and inexorability out of the apparently accidental. (Vide the exchange between the General and the jeweler in Madame de on the absence of accident in life.) Nothing is really an accident, only apparently. Plot contrivances may seem like accidents, but only until the Ophulsian mise-en-scène can transform these accidents into the most economical means of expressing the structure of a society. The fate of a pair of earrings (Madame de) or a miscarried baby (Caught) or a throne (Lola Montes) is secondary to the stirrings of restless movement provoked by these mini-melodramas. Thus the Ophulsian mise-en-scène does not transcend its subject; the mise-en-scène really is the subject. As Lola herself says, life is movement. The moving camera of Ophuls therefore does not so much comment on life as constitute it. For Ophuls, the rite of passage is continuous, and it is this extraordinary continuousness that distinguishes Ophuls from the other masters of mise-en-scène with whom he has been grouped: Mizoguchi, Murnau, Renoir, Rossellini, Dreyer, Welles; none of whom having as rigorously stripped away every last pretense to pictorialism as has Ophuls.

Ophulsian mise-en-scène can be considered as the most formal kind of screenwriting in that every scene is so constructed as to release its tension through movement, and every movement must justify itself not only through the dramatic psychology of the prime mover protagonist, but also through the sociological information revealed on the visual field during the movement. In a very subtle way, Ophulsian camera movement is an instrument of the most delicate irony in that the wildest emotions are tempered either by the indifferent motions of peripheral characters encountered along the way or by the metaphysical indifference of traversed space itself. It is no accident that Sternberg's cinema is memorable for its long banquet tables (composition) and Ophuls' for its lengthy waltzes across the barriers of time (camera movement). (Compare also the time spent at the dinner table in Renoir's restless The Rules of the Game and Bergman's more formally composed Smiles of a Summer Night.)

There are sixty shots of staircases in Madame de, but not one of them is dramatically effective in the Hitchcockian manner of Notorious and Psycho, nor philosophically portentous in the Wellesian manner of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. Indeed, it is possible to synopsize Madame de without once mentioning a staircase whereas with Hitchcock's staircases there are intimations of the Fall in the frenzied melodramatics of synchronized tracks, and with Welles' coffin-like slabs of steps there are suggestions of the dark at the top of the stairs in the economical expressionism of Gothic vertigo. With Ophuls it is movement itself that is emphasized rather than its terminal points of rest, and a peculiarly Ophulsian character has emerged as a consequence of this emphasis. This character is usually a woman afflicted with a secret feeling that makes her too restless to settle down into a pretty picture, a formal composition or a settled tableau. Ophuls introduces us to this character on the wing, fluttering determinedly toward her doom across a world indifferent to her suffering, past people who unknowingly contribute to her romantic illusions by perpetuating the sham and pretense of continental sophistication and cosmopolitanism. Ophuls has chosen this world not to indulge it, nor to satirize it, nor to condemn it, but rather to place himself outside camera range at a sufficient distance to maintain an intelligent perspective on the rapturous movements of his own feelings.