SOURCE: "The Mastery of Movement: An Appreciation of Max Ophuls," in Film Comment, Vol. 5, No. 4, Winter, 1969, pp. 71-4.

[In the following essay, Williams places Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman in a cinematic tradition that includes Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons and William Wyler's The Little Foxes.]

When Letter from an Unknown Woman came out of Hollywood in 1948, it was publicised—accurately, and with that hint of big-studio condescension that obviously drew in far more patrons than it alienated—as "the simple, poignant kind of love-story that women like."¹ With Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan in the leading roles, the women did indeed like the film; it made a lot of money, and it was promptly forgotten. In The New York Times of April 29 that year, Bosley Crowther was probably right, on the whole, in saying resignedly: "All right, if all you are after is an hour and a half of wistfulness, of lingering love-lorn expressions and pseudo-Viennese "schmaltz"; . . . a little heavy, perhaps, in its expression, but wistful and schmaltzy none the less. But if you are looking for sensibility and reasonable emotion in a film, beware of this overwritten Letter."

But Letter, though produced by Universal-International mostly along the lines indicated by Crowther, was of course directed by no less an artist than Max Ophuls, who already had made 16 features² and shorts in Germany, Austria and France, and who was soon to return to Europe to make two films that are generally accounted his finest. A recent opportunity to see Letter again³ revealed to me some beautiful moments that anticipated these later, superb works—La Ronde and Madame De. . . . Thus, Letter demonstrates not only the extraordinary momentum of a certain cinematic style dominant in the Hollywood of those days, but also the capacity of a director of rare gifts to inject some of his own aesthetic into an essentially uncongenial genre. Although Crowther was right—the drama lacked all reasonable emotion—it is no less true that Ophuls' exceptional visual sensibility appears in several places, and in one brief scene with a consummate brilliance equal to anything in La Ronde or Madame De . . . .

Letter belongs to an important genre in the Hollywood of World War II and the immediate post-war years that counted among its most distinguished parents William Wyler's The Little Foxes and Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. At its best, it was a marvelously intense genre; at its less than best, it could be unbearably turgid. Where Welles gave us emotional energy, his would-be imitators often gave us sluggishness. The most useful word of praise by a newspaper reviewer for such a film was liable to be "moving." Customarily based on a substantial literary or theatrical source—Letter, for example, came from a novelette by Stefan Zweig—the story often became, on the screen, not something momentous, as in Foxes and Ambersons, but just terribly earnest in an embarrassing, Longfellowish way. Lighter moments and humor relieved only temporarily a rather monotonous sense of life as doom. Photography inclined, in a degree uncommon in Hollywood before the war, to strong highlighting and shadow, in fairly deep spaces. The virtues of the best examples of this genre have been thoroughly argued by the late André Bazin in lesser examples, however, these visual qualities together with music that was more underscoring than scoring, served mostly to add rhetoric to somewhat improbable tales.

In Letter, a Viennese mädchen falls in love at the age of 15 with a concert pianist and loves him to her untimely death at 29, though he was only briefly aware of her existence. The story is treated with the overall sentimentality and sense of melodramatic doom to which it is liable. The photography—by a cameraman who shared Ophuls' European background, Frank Planer—is always of high quality, while remaining almost entirely in the chiaroscuro style by then conventional for the genre. Thus, Louis Jourdan's handsome face is deeply shadowed in a small circle of light as he pores over the unknown woman's deathbed letter. When as the pianist he practises Mozart, we see him swaying before the keyboard, with the raised piano-top, in one shot, reflecting his image. There is a touching au revoir at a railroad station, from which the camera cuts abruptly to a tunnel-like shot of a nun approaching down a dark, convent corridor with a candle that lights her white face and starched cowl. Our first knowledge that the anticipated rendezvous was not kept—after the pianist's return from a concert tour, the heroine meanwhile having found herself pregnant—is given by a camera which, observing the nun entering a curtained cubicle, lifts solemnly to read a placard bearing the words. "Father: unknown." Inside, the Sister tries to elicit the culprit's name, but a wan Joan Fontaine, in close-up, stoically refuses. The underscoring music of Daniele Amfitheatrof throughout the film goes appropriately pizzicato at moments of urgency, swells oceanically in the strings during the embrace, and so on, In its general traits, then, Letter is not much to merit special critical attention.

But, among these conventional sequences, occur at least five scenes that, brief as they are, take one's breath away. They give sudden impressions of the hand of an exceptional artist and contrast radically with the rest of the film. The lighting (in all but a midnight-supper scene) is comparatively bright, even on the white side, and thus, very significantly, it is without the dramatizing highlights and shadows of the rest of the picture. The content, in all these scenes but one, is some particularly sophisticated and artificial indoor region: an exclusive dress shop, an expensive supper club, the Opera. Even the one outdoor scene, of a band and a cafe, is so charming (it is obviously a set) that it seems more like an interior than a town square. The camera work within these scenes is also distinctive. Cutting is almost completely eschewed in favor of trucking, dollying and gliding that is swanlike in its ease and grace; thus", different elements that one would expect to see parceled out among discontinuous shots are here rendered as phases of a perfectly continuous gentle progression.

This combination of non-contrasting lighting, of an artificial-looking world and of a continuous take with a slowly shifting camera, puts on the screen a developing image of multitudinous harmonious details, many of which we realize we cannot observe explicitly, but which we have time to absorb and enjoy implicitly. There is a total attention to detail—not for verisimilitude so much as for the sheer delight of sensation and form. For example: a gentleman customer inquires of the couturiére about Joan Fontaine. He leans over a railing; she is seated at a slightly lower level. The curved line of the railing, the placing of the objects on the elegant escritoire, the attire, the confidential stance of the customer, are judged with a care that leaves nothing to chance. The same is true of the exquisite scene of Joan Fontaine modeling a glittering dress. This is not mere "costuming" and "sets" to make an "authentic periodpiece"—in which many lesser film makers have excelled, with expert assistance. As in, say, the Petit Trianon, it is the charming and frivolous treated with such loving respect that the result is compelling beauty. The supper scene—with its simply but tastefully laid table, the two diners framed on either side by curtains, and the camera slowly approaching in a frontal shot—is taste so pure that it becomes high imagination. The rate of approach of the camera is curiously important and affecting. As everyone knows, camera distance and movement can have a significant emotive tone—for example, in The Blue Angel, Josef von Sternberg backed off the camera and huddled it timorously by a staircase as the door of the school principal's office was about to open. However, as the camera approaches the privacy of the supper for two in Letter, the necessary emotional effect is much more difficult to achieve. There had to be no sense of intrusion, but no sense of hanging back apologetically. It is not so much a tone, as a certain quarter-tone, that had to be suggested.

Ophuls' full mastery of movement of both camera and performers is seen most fully, however, in two other, more complex scenes. In one a small band disperses and walks through a town square. The camera follows alongside, not quite keeping up, so that the band passes out of range to expose, suddenly; in middle-far distance, a bustle of activity at a café table where the heroine and a young officer have just joined her family. We know from the preceding scene that the mother and stepfather were expecting an announcement of suitorly intentions from the cadet, and that their daughter has already rejected him. We are ourselves taken off guard by the unexpected revelation in the distance of the little group in evident confusion, and we are led to experience a feeling of surprise that corresponds nicely to the significance of the activity around the café table. Discursively stated, of course, it seems a simple enough device. What makes it so lovely a sequence is the exact tempo at which the camera is made to follow the file of musicians and the exact moment in the sequence at which the screen space suddenly opens onto a bouquet of commotion in the background. "Le bon Dieu, " as another punctilious artist, Flaubert, once averred, "est dans les details! "

I have saved for the last the scene in Letter that seems to me the finest of these select moments, and perhaps the best of its particular kind anywhere in cinema. In the cadencing of a long, spiraling, continuous take, and in the organization of movements by actors' and extras, the shot is absolute perfection. The scene is an Opera foyer. Numerous arrivals move about in the splendid surroundings. Joan Fontaine and her elderly husband (she has married for the sake of her illegitimate son) ascend a grand staircase. They pause at the top. A group of gossips is chattering about the famous pianist, who has been spotted among the arrivals. Turning to face the camera, Joan Fontaine looks toward the foyer beneath on hearing the name of the man she still loves. It would obviously be logical, and indeed entirely advantageous to many directorial styles, to present this extremely complex sequence in a number of different shots (see Bergman's festive scenes in Smiles of a Summer Night, for example). Instead, mirabile visu!, Ophuls did it all in a single, unbroken take. He began with the people sauntering in the foyer, discreetly inclined the camera toward the staircase, glided forward lentissimo to follow the curving ascent of the heroine and her husband, came smoothly around to let us (and her) take in the gossiping group, and finally moved slowly to her face as she turned. The large number of actors in motion, the vast amount of space shown and traversed, and above all the aesthetic formula of the curving trajectory of the camera—all must have posed almost insuperable technical difficulties and required an infinity of rehearsals. Everything would have had to be precisely calculated beforehand—or rather, choreographed. And yet, the final effect is so completely at ease, so graceful, that the film seems to have done nothing at all difficult. We are permitted, if we care to, to be astonished; or we may simply take it all for granted. The dollying and trucking are, of course, a tribute to the skill of Frank Planer, and the fine set and costumes to Alexander Golitzen and Travis Benton. Nevertheless, the key role of the director's mind and sensibility is completely manifest in such an extraordinary scene, which had to be conceived in its totality and in every detail, from alpha to omega, in order to be executed. To have imagined its being filmed in precisely that way must have been fully as arduous in the event as it had to appear unconstrained after the fact, somewhat like an astonishing Bird In Flight by Brancusi.

The aesthetic summit of the film, this scene reveals the main qualities of Ophuls' rococo style. Although the physical size of the foyer is large, the expressive scale, the felt magnitude, is small, as is classically true of rococo art.⁴ At the same time, despite the feeling of minute elements, the foyer scene has an intrinsic visual clarity. Never does it seem fuzzy, in spite of the fact that a very large number of the component details, themselves multitudinous, cannot possibly be grasped in their own right. One feels that one could turn one's gaze away from the narrative center of interest and find the same lucidity of parts. I think it is the overall clarity of the design that stands surety in our minds for this possibility.

Another crucial factor in the beauty of the scene is the robbing of a very large space of that usual tendency, emphasized by Kant in connection with aesthetic experience, to look awesome by a strong suggestion of boundlessness. Ophuls tamed screen space; domesticated and artificialised it, so to speak, by rendering every segment decorative, ornate, visually delightful, and by unifying it with a clear design—of which the curving staircase is a central motif in the foyer scene.

It could only be a mistake, therefore, ever to associate this cinematic style with Impressionism, whose elements are always individually unclear. Ophuls' eye was much more logical than that of a Monet or a Pisarro. (Among modern painters, one might rather think of the Seurat of La Grande Jatte, who was an "Impressionist" only in a specific, technical sense.) The staircase, the chandelier, the gowns and uniforms, the feathers and insignia—every component of the foyer scene is individually as precise as motion-picture photography and lighting can render it in such a large area. The greater lighting-contrasts that characterize most of the film would, of course, have made certain parts here more emphatically visible, but at the cost of casting everything else into limbo. The connection between Ophuls' lighting and his overall structural sensibility is thus very close. A few years later, he was to exercise the same skill, now in a very small area, in the jewelry shop of Madame De . . .—another highly sophisticated, artificial region, with an ornate curving staircase, perhaps the very symbol of Ophuls' visual and dynamic sensibility.

I should like to add that perhaps Letter is also worth a brief critical memento at this time for its reminder of the virtue of a gliding camera. Ours is a decade whose undoubtedly most original artistic work in film, that of the so-called "underground cinema," happens to be very frequently characterized by a creative use of abrupt camera movements and dizzying visual discontinuities; from which, of course, the Ophuls technique I have described differs by worlds. The closest parallel in "underground" cinema is probably the long, sinuous, rhythmically cadenced, unbroken takes in Ed Emshwiller's superb George Dumpson's Place. Although Emshwiller addressed himself to an already existing situation—a poor man's shack and brick-à-brac amid overgrowth and foliage, rather than, as in Ophuls, to a meticulously prepared set—here, too, is photography with loving attention to detail and a rare grace. As such, it is stylistic organization that surely is worthy of constant cultivation and critical appreciation.

MAX OPHULS BIOGRAPHY

Max Ophuls was born Max Oppenheimer in Saarbrücken, Germany, in May 1902. He changed his name when his family objected to his career as an actor. By 1924, he was directing plays and within 6 years had worked on almost 200 productions, including works by Gogol, Buchner, Shakespeare and Schnitzler. In 1926, Ophuls worked at the Burgtheater in Vienna, where he met and married Hilda Wall, a famous actress of the day. Their son, Marcel (who has followed in his father's footsteps in film, recently debuting as director of Peau De Banane), was born the next year. Ophuls turned to film in 1930, and by the time he left Germany, in 1932, he had directed 5 films, one of which—Liebelei—is regarded as a minor masterpiece. For the next 8 years Ophuls worked throughout Europe, directing 10 films in France, among them Divine, from the script by Colette), one film in Italy (La Signora Di Tutti), one in Holland and after the fall of France, one film in Switzerland.

Arriving in Hollywood in 1941, Ophuls spent more than 4 years unemployed until Preston Sturges' discovery of Liebelei occasioned a rediscovery of its director. Ultimately, Ophuls made 4 films in America: The Exile; Letter from an Unknown Woman; Caught; and The Reckless Moment. After his return to France, in 1949, he directed a series of films which have become his most famous—La Ronde, Le Plaisir, Madame De . . . and the epitome of his style and art, Lola Montes.

Ophuls' work in film is unique and inimitable. Static compositions bore him; conventional tenets of montage and even the close up interest him very little. His films are built on movement. In Ophuls' hands the camera is capable of incredible, heady arabesques. This balletic camera, combined with Ophuls' penchant for extravagant decor, makes for a lush cinema in which dazzling pyrotechnics are carried off with a fluidity and ease that makes them seem almost inevitable. As James Mason once explained:

"A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor dear Max
Who separated from his dolly
Is wrapped in deepest melancholy."

NOTES

¹ See publicity on file in the Drama Research section of the Lincoln Center Library of Performing Arts, New York, whose excellent facilities I would like to acknowledge with gratitude.

² Ophuls [1902-1957] directed, among other films, Liebelei [1932], La Trendre Ennemie [1936], Sans Lendemain [1939], De Mayerling a Sarajevo [1940], The Exile [1947], Caught [1948], The reckless moment [1949], La Ronde [1950], Le Plaisir [1951], Madame de . . . [1953] and Lola Montes [1955], the last-named perhaps his most famous film, hailed by Andrew Sarris as "the greatest film of all time."

³ A print of Letter was made available to me by Brandon Films. For several observations that have been helpful in this essay, I wish to thank Dr. Kurt R. Eissler and James Mullins.

⁴ For a comparison in painting, one might cite Fragonard's large-size The Swing, which is much smaller expressively than, say, Poussin's relatively small-size Holy Family; owing entirely to differences in style.