[In the following essay, Archer identifies Ophuls as the most controversial figure in French cinema.]

La Ronde opens with the introduction of an autonomous entrepreneur, an addition to the text of Schnitzler's Reigen, who functions in the stylized manner of a Shakespearian Chorus. Wandering through a deserted sound stage, this enigmatic figure, suavely played by Anton Walbrook, regards his audience with polite disdain as he establishes the point of departure for the film. The theme, he announces, is love, in all its variations; the setting Vienna, gauzy and ornate; the mood nostalgia (violins commence an Oscar Strauss waltz); the time "le passé" ("J'adore le passé," he thoughtfully explains). By the time this curious combination of headwaiter and puppeteer has started the carousel which symbolizes La Ronde, it is clear that he is a calculated device carefully designed to lure audiences into acceptance of a point of view long considered outmoded: the stylized sentimentality of Lehar, Zweig, and das süsse Mädel.

In the works of Max Ophuls, who created and obviously inhabits the guise of the blasé Compère, the modern French cinema has divorced itself entirely from the issues of contemporary civilization and retrogressed into an aura of unadulterated romanticism. This unexpected throwback to an almost forgotten tradition has been greeted by a mixture of damns and praises from discerning critics, and has established Ophuls as the most controversial figure of the modern French cinema. Ignoring the tastes of his critics (perhaps as disdainful of them as his identification with the Compère would indicate), Ophuls has continued along his predetermined pattern to create a formidable body of work. His lavish films, garnished with performances from the ablest and most expensive actors on the European screen, have attracted an amount of international attention which requires an appraisal and revaluation of Ophuls' individual esthetic genre.

An acceptance of Ophuls' extreme romanticism is essential to an understanding of his work. Born in Germany in 1902, Ophuls followed a devious cinematic route before arriving at the present fruition of his career. His first important film, in 1932, was German (Liebelei); this was followed by insignificant work in Italy, England, France (De Mayerling à Sarajevo, 1939, is the most notable film of his early period), and an unsuccessful apprenticeship in Hollywood (Letter from an Unknown Woman, Caught, The Reckless Moment). Throughout this formative period, Ophuls, continually uprooted by World War II, retained as a personal characteristic only his nostalgic absorption with the romantic past. He returned to Paris in 1950 to direct Greta Garbo and James Mason in an adaptation of Balzac's La Duchesse de Langeais. When insufficient financing dissolved the project, Ophuls remained in Europe to create La Ronde.

Admirers of Schnitzler's Reigen, vexed at the director's disregard for the bitter cynicism which set the tone of the original work, have failed to comprehend the complete reorientation of Ophuls' conception. La Ronde can be appreciated only as a romance. The "rondelay of love" which frames the film is an obvious contradiction of the sharply realistic approach of Schnitzler's wry commentary on social classes linked by disease. The film's ten episodes comprise, instead, a single romantic thread: the beginning of momentary desire, rising to exaggerated youthful passion, gliding through mature consummation to a poignant attempt to recapture the adolescent fervor, fading ultimately into the bored familiarity which breeds over-sophistication. The final sequence of this much-discussed and little-understood film clearly establishes its essentially tragic meaning: the morning-after of the satiated count, desperately attempting to establish some new significance in an encounter with the virginal prostitute, but discovering sadly that too much experience has dulled sensation of every meaning save empty regret. Unperceptive audiences, delighted with the charming comedy of the earlier sequences, inclined toward a disappointed reaction to the disenchantment of the conclusion, failing to grasp its significance in the structure of the film. This essentially moral observation gives the final thematic unity to Ophuls' remarkably adroit composition.

La Ronde, although originally Viennese, was eminently suited to a Gallic interpretation, but the difficulties of Ophuls' expatriation were more apparent in his subsequent adaptation of de Maupassant's Le Plaisir. For Ophuls, this film served as an experimental introduction to the form of the classic French nouvelle at which he was later to excel. The opening sketches, "Le Masque" and "Le Modèle," were slight but exquisitely devised; a suspicion of over-elaboration in the technique did not seriously damage the effectiveness of the anecdotes as curtain-raisers for an impressive pièce de résistance. It was in the ambitious "La Maison Tellier," however, that Ophuls' basically alien approach proved too severe a handicap. In adapting de Maupassant's account of the mistress of a bordello who takes her bevy of girls to the country to witness a niece's first communion, Ophuls followed the text with fidelity but unwisely chose to linger salaciously over the spectacle of the highly respectable village businessmen showing concern at the unexpected closing of their Saturday evening club—a change of emphasis which translated de Maupassant's subtly ironic comment on bourgeois morality into a rather obvious off-color joke. Although Christian Matras' eloquent camera, gliding to the inevitable strains of another Oscar Strauss waltz, contributed a visual texture of unusual distinction, Le Plaisir, in consequence of the imbalance of its episodes, emerged as a clever pastiche of monumental insignificance—the kind of film which foreign audiences regard as "typically French."

Louise de Vilmorin's Madame de . . . is a love story so austere in its structure that it enables Ophuls to concentrate on the visual symbolism at which he is most adept. Retaining the artistic frame of La Ronde (with a wandering pair of ear-rings substituted for the revolving carousel), he again begins his film as high comedy, soars to heights of romanticism, and resolves into a tragedy which in this instance is personal rather than abstract. Instead of a series of lovers, Madame de . . . concentrates on its heroine (Danielle Darrieux, the young wife in the crucial central episodes of La Ronde), whose casual flirtation with a dashing ambassador suddenly emerges as a grand passion, and changes her in the process from a vain and capricious child-wife into a woman of proud maturity. The recurrent ear-rings motif is employed first as a symbol for the woman's careless vanity, as she sells the jewels to pay a frivolous debt, then as a love-token, which she is emotionally obliged to accept although recognizing that the gift binds her to her past deceit, and, ultimately, as a symbol for her self-destructive pride, when in a regenerating gesture, she sacrifices the jewels to the altar as a hopeless offering for her lover's life. This comprehensive characterization is linked by subtle nuances to an analysis of a complex social structure in a film of classic stature.

The world of Max Ophuls is filled with winding staircases and plush curtains; graceful motions and modulated voices; fragile women in ornamental gowns, soft furs, and glittering jewels; virile men wearing buckled swords and polished brass. It is a handsome and a luxurious world which Ophuls investigates with catlike steps: his camera is rarely still but never abrupt, gliding rhythmically with the dancing actors, circling walls to peer through leaves and windows, always suggesting more than it shows. Time flows imperceptibly as the puppeteer of La Ronde leads the delicate bonne through a deserted ballroom from a past defeat to a new conquest; as the sophisticated lovers of Madame de . . . dance with mounting impetuosity through a ceaseless series of formal balls. The influence of this limpid cinematic method is only beginning to be realized, in the works of such disparate creators as René Clair (in Les Grandes Manœuvres), Luchino Visconti (Senso), and Jean Renoir (French-Cancan). Yet Ophuls, with a style of pyrotechnical dexterity and supple grace, remains a unique figure in the cinema, a director of poetic sensibility, the evocator of a forgotten epoch.