SOURCE: "Madame de: A Musical Passage," in Favorite Movies: Critic's Choice, edited by Philip Nobile, Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1973, pp. 133-45.

[In the following essay, Haskell places Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman in a league of her favorite films, including Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Preston Sturges 's Hail the Conquering Hero, Ingmar Bergman's Persona, and Francois Truffaut's Jules et Jim.]

Everyone Agrees, and a good deal of criticism is based on the fact, that our response to film is intensely personal and mysteriously chemical. Despite their growing academic respectability, movies still have the power to start violent arguments, to turn mild-mannered vegetarians into carnivorous beasts, to become the soapbox for every passing ideologue, to blight budding relationships and dissolve secure ones. A reviewer's love of a film is subject to all the vagaries of love—or friendship—between two human beings, and while loyalty and a certain steadfastness are desirable, his favorite film will change from year to year according to shifts in his moods and preoccupations. This is as it should be. Cinema is still a popular, living art in which the word "masterpiece"—which is as much a term of critical consensus as a statement of intrinsic merit—has little authority.

All the same, such terms must be applied and such choices, however mutable, must be made. The idea of a "favorite film" is a controversial one—I would be the first to denounce the use of such categories to elevate one work of art at the expense of others, or one director on the shoulders of another (the refuge of film criticism which is ashamed of its subject)—but it is ultimately a defensible one. For the reviewer who tries both to keep up and catch up, the sheer quantity of film, of images hurtling together in the memory, is a factor to contend with. For me, then, making ten-best lists and declaring favorites is not just a way of giving recognition to a director, but also of bringing to a temporary halt the flow of images and sorting them into the patterns which have meaning for me and by which I define my aesthetic.

I admire and respond to Max Ophuls's Madame de for all the reasons which follow, but also because it speaks to me at this moment in time as a woman halfway between tradition and liberation, a woman who will honor every step in the direction of presenting and encouraging a more complex view of woman without abandoning the art of the past, especially—as in the case of Madame de—when a radical portrait is disguised in conservative clothing.

For the record, along with Ophuls on the top rung of my personal pantheon, I would list: Hitchcock, Renoir, Hawks and Keaton. And crowded on the second rung, occasionally spilling over to the first or the third, are: Lubitsch, Murnau, Lang, Mizoguchi, Sternberg, Cukor, McCarey, Preminger, Ford, Chabrol, Sturges, Godard, Bergman, Bresson, Dreyer, Griffith and Rossellini.

My other favorite films are: Vertigo, Under Capricorn, Les Bonnes Femmes, Sunrise, Contempt, French Cancan, La Règle du Jeu, Sherlock, Jr., Rio Bravo, The General, Woman in the Window, Bringing Up Baby, The Searchers, Design for Living, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Morocco, The Magnificent Ambersons, Sansho the Bailiff, Holiday, Hail the Conquering Hero, Au Hasard, Balthazar, Strangers on a Train, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, La Femme Infidele, Gertrud, Ordet, Summer Interlude, Persona, Jules et Jim, Band of Outsiders, Showboat (1936), The Miracle and Oharu.

But when it came down to choosing one film, I did not select any of these. Perhaps I had just written about one or the other. Or maybe I had just read an analysis that seemed to do temporary justice to one of them. Or perhaps it was just that I had seen none so recently and with such a powerful aftereffect as Madame de.

The image of women projected by most film directors has been shaped by one of three basic attitudes: puritanical discomfort, misogyny or (the obverse of misogyny) idealization. Max Ophuls is one of the five or six great directors—Mizoguchi, Renoir, Dreyer, Sternberg, Bergman—who place women at the center of their universe and honor them with a love that neither crushes nor sanctifies. The heroines of Madame de, Lola Montes, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Caught, The Reckless Moment are creations of a director for whom the passionate exaltation of the eternal feminine does not preclude the dispassionate exploration of specific women, just as delirium and determinism are the twin components of the director's style.

Like Stendhal, one of his favorite writers, Ophuls sees woman as a creature at a distinct disadvantage in a society laid out by men, but in whom the gesture toward liberation, usually in the form of a commitment to love, becomes far more daring and heroic than the deeds for which men are crowned. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir bestows on Stendhal's women the words of praise she accords the creations of no other male writers, and they might equally well apply to Ophuls's Madame de:

The so-called serious man is really futile, because he accepts ready-made justifications for his life; whereas a passionate and profound woman revises established values from moment to moment. She knows the constant tension of unsupported freedom; it puts her in constant danger: she can win or lose all in an instant. It is the anxious assumption of this risk that gives her story the colors of a heroic adventure. And the stakes are the highest there are: the very meaning of existence.

In the period context in which Ophuls has cast her, Madame de represents the romantic incarnation of the liberated woman, a figure whose true nobility is often clouded by the general disrepute of "women's fiction," a genre Ophuls both cherishes and transfigures. While giving special attention to this aspect of Madame de, I have no intention of turning the film into a Women's Lib tract (Ms de)! For one thing, the characters of the two men, played by Charles Boyer and Vittorio de Sica, are too important, and Boyer even draws audience sympathy away from Danielle Darrieux's Madame de. If she is the most obsessed and audacious of the three, she is not morally superior to the men (or at least to Boyer), the way Bergman's women often are to his men. Madame de does not achieve her spiritual splendor through the tarnished souls around her, but through a solitary struggle in which she surrenders the lesser part of herself for the greater part—"The woman I was made me the woman I am."

Just as Madame de progresses from self-centered society lady to saint, the film moves from soap opera to sublime art, redeeming itself and its heroine in the process. But even the most unredeemable soap opera, we should remember, has served as compensation for women who, denied the outlet of challenging work, and strung out on the interminable trivia of household chores, can feel an inverted sense of superiority in submission and self-denial. The trouble is that in pushing the ecstasies of martyrdom, soap opera has recruited more victims and reinforced rather than relieved the inequity of male-female roles.

Perhaps a key difference between soap opera and serious art on the same subject, apart from the crucial factors of intelligence and style, is that soap opera is a sedative, a kind of artistic Catholicism, which encourages passive resignation to what is seen as a general and unalterable law. Real art, on the other hand, has the opposite effect, since it shows people who dare to rebel, who break the rules, people poised on a moral precipice in which any move may be a fall but in which it is not only possible but imperative to choose the direction.

The difference between the two is the difference in Madame de between a tragic ending which involves the three main characters (and the death of two) and a denouement in which Madame de leaves each man one earring, or, in other words, the difference between Ophuls's film and its source, a novel by Louise de Vilmorin. The latter, an ironic, sub-Maupassant tale written and set in the thirties, was very much a "woman's story" in the pejorative sense. The circular plot (transposed by Ophuls into an aristocratic, turn-of-the-century setting) concerns the fate of a frivolous society lady who, in pawning a pair of earrings given her by her husband as a wedding present, sets up a chain of circumstances which, when she falls seriously in love, closes in and destroys her. In its skeleton form, it is a tale for which the American title, The Earrings of Madame de, would have been appropriate had not Ophuls transformed it into a masterpiece of visual narration in which every image, expression, line of dialogue, camera movement and dissolve has both emotional weight and structural significance.

The screenplay by Ophuls, Marcel Achard and Annette Wademant is a gem of succinct exposition and expressive dialogue, phrases reiterated but with different meanings. For example, in the magnificent ballroom scene, in which Danielle Darrieux and Vittorio de Sica waltz in one continuous motion, across the weeks and into the depths of love, the phrase "les nouvelles sont excellentes" occurs three or four times. It is uttered by Madame de, first seriously then ironically, in reply to De Sica's inquiry after her absent husband's health, and indicates both the passage of time and the growth of intimacy. The next and last time it is used, it is Boyer who reassures his wife that De Sica is well after his fall from a horse. "Je sais," she replies, using the words De Sica had used in their last exchange.

Another example of Ophuls's deepening and transfiguring of the original: the story seems to hang heavily on coincidence and chance, not just in the peregrinations of the earrings, but in the attention given fortune-telling cards, the number 13 and other signs through which luck is raised to a guiding principle. But Ophuls, while retaining the references to chance—largely as character details—emphasizes, in a beautiful observation by Boyer, the supreme naturalness of coincidence. He makes it clear that the drama lies not in the whereabouts of the earrings (except as their movement imitates an inner journey) but in their symbolic importance: the value placed on them, the lies told for them, the consequences of the lies—all the interlocking moves in a game of character, not chance, a game in which the outcome has the inevitability of tragedy.

Oscar Straus's beautifully sentimental score adjusts itself, without breaking stride, from the rapturous lilt of the waltz to the wistful and finally desolate strains of loss. It accompanies every appearance of the jewels except one: when, in a ruse to deceive her husband, Madame de lets them drop from the gloves where she has concealed them. They fall onto the table with a frightening finality, with no music to attenuate their impact at this turning point of the film. Actually, turning point is the wrong word because, although the story is full of turning points, the film itself is always turning. The movement is not only circular but spiral, so that when it comes back to the same place—as in the ballroom scene, the jewelers, the church, etc.—it has reached a deeper (or higher) level. Circles occasionally give way to straight lines, as in the movements and visual motifs of Boyer, a general, and in the single stretch in which Madame de, traveling to escape from her love, takes a long walk up the beach, trying in vain to control an emotion that is as vast and overwhelming as the ocean.

The women of Stendhal and Ophuls are not ordinary women. They are among the few who escape, who awaken from the dream-sleep—society's lifelong anesthetic—and overcoming the taboos of both society and their own inhibitions, embark on what Simone de Beauvoir calls "the adventure of liberty."

That this is one of the greatest themes of fiction—and most beautiful in Ophuls's hands—is a notion which makes so-called serious critics uneasy. Agreeing that Ophuls is a consummate stylist, they nevertheless refuse to take him seriously, on the grounds, presumably, of his choice of subject matter and feminine orientation, and the suspicion that nothing tragic can be expressed in so nearly painless a style. To this, Jean-Luc Godard gave the answer in his remark on Hitchcock and Rossellini (cited by Andrew Sarris) when he said of Hitchcock that where there is so much form there must be content (the converse applying to Rossellini). One has but to watch and feel Madame de to realize that Ophuls's style is, in the words Boyer uses to describe his marriage to Darrieux, "only superficially superficial." The perpetual motion of Ophuls's camera is both circular and progressive, the representation in time and space of the human journey through eternity. Each staircase climbed and descended, each corridor traversed, takes the body one space further toward the grave, and each lilting, contrapuntal swing of the camera suggests the soul's freedom to fly. This is a more complex and ultimately more tragic vision than Louise de Vilmorin's, or even Arthur Schnitzler's, whose plays Ophuls adapted, to the honor of the literati and the glory of film history.

The dismissal, or downgrading, of Ophuls as a "woman's director," seems to rest on a cultural and (male) sexual prejudice that is as old as art itself: a belief that the life of the heart is somehow a less worthy subject of serious treatment than such "large subjects" as wars, politics, religion and social causes. Treated seriously, it is soap opera, and people are likely to overlook the fact that what in one man's hands is soap opera is, in the hands of another—say, Euripides, Racine, Stendhal, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Proust, Mozart and Ophuls—the stuff of art. And now, with the relations between the sexes at an all-time low, the concept of love is in danger of dying altogether or of being reduced, by medical authority, to a conditioned response—the saliva of sickness or need. It will be up to the French, who have always been more alert to the subject than the rest of us, to remind us that if love is an uncontrollable emotion, to love is a choice and therefore a moral act. Max Ophuls, German-born, a man of the world in exile, but a spiritual Frenchman, understood that the heart's engagement is lonelier and—in the eyes of the world—less glamorous than political engagement. Love takes greater risks because it gains less credit than the socially honored heroics of battle and public gesture.

This is an odd notion, and film, for young people today to appreciate, particularly if they are Americans. In a permissive society, or among a permissive generation, the idea of risk and retribution has no meaning, and the rigid, unspoken rules of a French class society are as remote to college students as kinship patterns among the Hopi tribes. This, unfortunately, indicates once again that sexual liberation actually works against true liberation: that constant, soul-defining struggle with parental authority, social restrictions and private inhibitions in which some principles are guarded, some modified and some abandoned.

So widespread is the current sense of alienation that there is no established, homogeneous majority which can represent "society." For Ophuls there was, or had to be, which is why he preferred and was most eloquent in prewar Europe as a setting. Ophuls's society, like Stendhal's, was not just an abstract idea but a system, both blessed and cursed, a collectivity of real faces ready to serve, support or censure according to the events and their role in them. And it was against such a solid ordering of human destiny that the individual flaunted his or her obsession and took the consequences.

Vittorio de Sica, Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux, in their incarnations as the baron, the count and Madame de are extraordinarily beautiful, radiant, rich, aristocratic—stars in every sense of the word, yet Ophuls places them firmly within a society in which every position is clearly defined and interconnected. It is the cosmic order in miniature, its regular movements reflecting the orbit of planets, its irregular passions the trajectory of meteors. In such a universe, it is the most natural thing imaginable for A to advance to B, and  to bump into C, and C to charm D, and D to dance with E, and E to end up sitting next to F, and F to fall into the arms of G, and so on. So on, that is, as long as they keep moving. For to stop is to cause a ripple, and in Madame de's world, a ripple is a tempest. The wealth and leisure of the aristocracy entitle them to certain freedoms denied the lower classes, but the rules are subtler and stricter, and the tiniest infraction reverberates from the orchestra to the galleries. In the marvelous and characteristically Ophulsian opera scene, the opera (Gluck this time, not Mozart) is interrupted—always a faux pas!—by Madame de's revelation that her earrings have been stolen, with the consequence that her husband is obliged to turn the opera house—and all Paris—upside down in search of them. In a stylish cacophony of hushed voices (whispers which ring out like bells), doors (inner and outer) opening and closing, rumors spreading, ushers leaping to their feet, we are given a comic vignette of a hierarchical society and the chain of command in which servants jump to their masters' bidding and masters in turn scrape before their mistresses. There is a beautifully edited sequence in which Boyer, having gone home to search for the earrings, calls the servants. In one shot, we see the entire household staff leaping at different speeds up the stairs. The next shot, with precisely the reverse motion and meaning, shows Madame de, surrounded by admiring beaux, descending the stairs of the opera with careless grace. Thus in one lyrically lighthearted episode, Ophuls gives us sociology and psychology, the world of Madame de and the disruptive influence she is to have on it.

At one point—in the jeweler's—we see Madame de gracefully swooning. At another—after De Sica's accident—she faints for four minutes instead of three, and Boyer is alarmed. This is a society which permits, even encourages, a woman to enjoy flirtations as long as she abides by the unwritten rules governing such affairs. If she falls in love—already bad form—there are even allowances for that, provided she doesn't impose her feelings on others, or compromise her husband's honor. Ophuls's complex pattern of camera movements—rapturous, lyrical pans and tracks and occasionally sudden swings, within a larger, strictly observed symmetrical system—reflects the paradox of Madame de's social situation and, on a larger scale, the mystery of free will and determinism.

Madame de, one of society's crowning jewels, rejects her "setting" (one thinks of the first time we see her, her face framed in a mirror), thus enacting the primal conflict of tragedy, the individual against society. But in one sense she, like other tragic figures, has been outside society all along. The spoiled and petted darling of the beginning of the film is no more in touch with reality than the mystically redeemed saint of the end. And when, in her passion for De Sica—loving him, then losing him—she turns her back on society, it is not just its luxuries and ornaments she rejects but its premises: her role as wife and mother. This is clear in the scene in which Boyer takes her to the country house, teeming with children of his poor relations, and forces her to make a gift of the earrings to a niece who has just given birth. Madame de tosses the earrings to her and, in a touchingly comic gesture, hastens to the crib where to hide her grief she makes a pretense of admiring the baby—a baby that arouses no more feeling in her than a harmless insect, the product of a cycle of nature in which she wants no part. If this isn't a radical gesture, I'd like to know what is!

In the beginning is the end, and in the first two and a half minutes of Madame de, in an extraordinary single-take sequence, we are given the particulars of her life which foreshadow her death. In one of the most graceful bits of exposition in all cinema, Ophuls introduces Madame de to us through her possessions, as she is pondering which to surrender. At first all we see is her hand as it searches with sensory pleasure among her jewels and furs and dresses, up and down, across, over and back, rejecting first one and then the other. In the course of this inventory, she drops a Bible, holds it for a second and replaces it; regrets aloud the absence of her mother who "would tell me what to do"; holds her cross fondly and at the idea of pawning it cries, "Oh, no! I adore that"; and finally settles on the earrings her husband gave her, on the grounds that "I can do with them as I please."

During this sequence, Ophuls has told us Madame de's preoccupations, her character, her attitude toward and relations with her husband, with her mother and with God; in what she lacks, he has prefigured what she will come to have, and in what she possesses, what she will no longer have. The reference to her mother reveals how she has been spoiled, that she misses her mother and that it is to her mother, or her mother's memory (at the expense of her husband), that she has always turned for help. In the array of her possessions and the affection she lavishes on them, we see that they are everything to her and are no doubt compensation for a loveless marriage. In her almost sensual familiarity with the Bible (which she keeps among her furs) and the cross, she reveals a direct, childish sense of closeness to God, of whom she can ask favors and expect the indulgence of a doting parent. The decision to sell the earrings given her by her husband—not just as an ordinary present but as a wedding present—constitutes an explicit rejection of him and a repudiation of their marriage. Her comment that she can do with the earrings as she pleases is another way of saying that, having no affective value, they have no power over her (even here, at her most materialistic, she avers that the claims of love are the only binding ones); and this is in sharp contrast to her later deranged behavior toward, and possession by, the earrings when they have been given to her by the baron. Invested with the "revised value" of love, they are now as binding and inescapable as religious vows; she is at their mercy, no longer free to "do with them as (she) pleases," and thus does passion become fate.

Almost every action in the first half of the film has its double, or mirror image, in the second half, only they express the opposite relation to each other: the first images are the mirrors, the echoes, of the deeper and truer essences which will emerge.

Madame de's first visit to the church (on the way to the jeweler's), where she perfunctorily crosses herself and asks God to "make him understand and I'll never forget you," has its double in the end where she, near death herself, prays in anguished sincerity for the life of De Sica, who is about to meet Boyer in a duel. Her prayer appeals to the spiritual nature of her love: "You know we loved in thought only." And this is followed, after the duel and Madame de's death, by the third and final shot in the church in which, after a long, stately track to the altar, the camera pans from the altar to a small shrine where Madame de's earrings have been placed in memoriam, thus joining, gently, comically and reverently before God, the material and spiritual sides of Madame de, sanctifying her love and redeeming her life.

The first time we see Madame de, it is her reflected image in the mirror on her dressing table, framed by the luxuries which are an extension of her being and without which she is nothing. As the film progresses and her love grows, she dresses more severely, becomes physically wasted, and even her surroundings take on an ascetic look. She is perhaps no longer beautiful by society's standards, but she is more beautiful by the higher and more demanding ones of the spirit. In her last agonizing and comical encounter with De Sica, she has rushed to warn him about the duel, knowing he no longer loves her, but still daring to hope.

"I am not even pretty," she says sadly.

"More than ever," he replies.

"Really?" her eyes light up, with a coquetry that shows how much she is still herself. Then just as quickly, "I'm incorrigible," she confesses, with an awareness that shows just how far she has come.

One of the glories of Ophuls's conception of Madame de is that even as she is ennobled by her love, she retains some of the myopia and weakness of her former self. Thus the brutal lesson of her suffering teaches her nothing of the pain she has caused her husband, and her eyes are never opened to the mute misery he endures in loving her.

As a general in charge of an artillery unit headquartered in Paris, Boyer has the rectitude, the faith in social conventions and a certain lack of imagination characteristic of the Ophulsian military figure. At the same time, he has a stern formality that we come to realize has been forced on him and is alien to his disposition. In a heartbreaking moment late in the film, as Madame de is languishing on a chaise longue, Boyer confesses he never had much taste for the image she had of him and for the role she made him play, but she is too far gone in her own unhappiness to hear. The brilliant subtlety of Boyer's performance, with its suggested reserves of feeling, becomes more apparent with successive viewings of the film. We begin to sense that every care lavished on Madame de—from her family, her personal servant Nanou and friends—has been love withheld from him, and that his gentleness, increasingly obvious to us, is forever hidden to her. She refuses to make the sympathetic leap, symbolized by the vast space between their beds, necessary to unleash the passion smoldering within him. Ophuls permits us to glimpse Boyer's passion, through the correlative images of fire, that is in some ways more magnificent than Madame de's for being undeclared. Unlike the simpler character of De Sica, whose love is destroyed when his honor is insulted, Boyer allows his honor to be defiled, but not his love. By not acknowledging his love or accepting his friendship, Madame de unconsciously wills his death; in order not to be turned into an object, Boyer must challenge De Sica to a duel.

The two men—one worldly, the other more innocent—react in ways perfectly justified by any normal criteria of human behavior, but they are criteria by which Madame de can no longer be judged. She has bypassed good and evil and conventional morality in the total—religious, romantic, neurotic and heroic—sublimation of her entire being into a passion which refuses to make room for anything else. The men, gentlemen and standard-bearers of the masculine code, are prevented by their straightforwardness from imagining the depths of her commitment, or from understanding the difference between her lies.

Knowing Ophuls's fondness for Stendhal and Mozart, critics have often wondered why he never used their work as the textual or musical basis for his films. He never adapted Stendhal, and he restricted his use of Mozart to the opera scenes within his films, but it is precisely by not trying to transfer classics from one medium to another that Ophuls created something comparable in his own. The whorl of La Ronde is closer to the sustained lyric and comic ecstasy of Così fan tutte than a film like Sunday, Bloody Sunday, which uses the score throughout. And Madame de is closer to the world of Stendhal, both in style and in its harsher view of risk and redemption, than Claude Autant-Lara's film of The Red and the Black. Ophuls uses objects and images the way Mozart uses music—to define character and feelings and the subtle alteration in each. Like Mozart and Stendhal, but in his own uniquely cinematic language, Ophuls conveys shifts and transitions, the crossover from playfulness to passion, without ever deviating from the elegance and grace of the original style and the world it sustains. People who are attuned to more blatant histrionics may miss the clues, expecting Wagnerian sonorities when a magic flute or a flutter of paper signals the transition. Through a conceit of cinematic metamorphosis reminiscent of Keaton's Sherlock, Jr., Ophuls shows us such a transition, as the pieces of a love letter Madame de has torn and thrown from the train window metamorphose into the snow flakes of a crystallized love. To accept the fate of Madame de, you must believe that the depths of love can be rendered by a flurry of snowflakes and that the distance between death-in-life and life-in-death, symbolized by the journey of a pair of earrings, can be crossed by a moving camera. The film never stops to underline its purpose but, like a Mozart opera, is in constant motion, incorporating every moment into the highest and purest lyrical expression. Sometimes you long to catch it and hold it, to stop it in its tracks and luxuriate in an image, even as you know that its beauty is movement and that its very essence lies in the poignancy of its passing.