- The Earrings of Madame de . . .
This weekend, the Music Box wrapped up its series “Weepie Noir: The Dark Side of Women’s Pictures” with a 16-millimeter screening of Letter from an Unknown Woman, the great melodrama by master filmmaker Max Ophuls, whose unfortunately brief career yielded one of cinema’s richest and most resonant filmographies. He is, of course, known for his baroque style and brilliant long takes, but as Francois Truffaut explained in his obituary of the director, “He was not the virtuoso or the aesthete or the decorative filmmaker he has been called. . . . Like his friend Jean Renoir, Ophuls always sacrificed technique to the actor.” That’s true—however, at the risk of sounding presumptuous, I think characters, particularly female protagonists, interested Ophuls far more than actors. He calibrated every filmmaking decision to the minds, desires, and lives of the people in his films, so much that his camera became an extension of their being, visualizing a hidden quality that literary critics describe as “interiority.” I also don’t think Ophuls “sacrifices” anything—his style is built into his artistic mission. He once said, “The camera exists to create a new art and to show above all what cannot be seen elsewhere, neither in theater nor in life,” a notion exemplified in his best films. You can see my five favorite Ophuls films below.
- The Reckless Moment (1949) This film, the final one Ophuls made in the United States, is overshadowed by the more famous stuff he made upon returning to Europe, as Dave Kehr notes. But as the title implicates, it’s superb melodrama, ballsy and lurid in ways generally unassociated with the director. Ophuls is an underrated genre alchemist—here, he infuses the narrative and visual design with elements of noir and the thriller, underlining the already cerebral material with deep psychological intrigue.
