Full-Blown Romanticism and Delicate Irony

Max Ophuls was among the most interesting of the famous directors in French and German cinema who were forced to flee to America by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. Unlike many of his compatriots, he created at least one masterpiece in Hollywood and five years later made a related but even greater work in France—the famous The Earrings of Madame De … The American film was Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948).

How it came to be made was related in an article by its scriptwriter, Howard Koch, for a collection of interviews, reminiscences and commentary on screenwriting edited by Richard Corliss and published as The Hollywood Screenwriters in 1972. At the time Corliss was mounting a challenge to the auteur theory as expounded by Andrew Sarris in his ground-breaking American Cinema Directors and Directions 1929–1968. Sarris had adapted the politique des auteurs of French criticism to American film. He had created a pantheon of directors such as Charles Chaplin, Orson Welles and Ophuls to demonstrate that the main force in the creation of any film had to be the director. The theory, as Sarris was to admit later, was deliberately polemical and by the 1970s was being challenged by, among others, one of his own students—Richard Corliss! He was making the same kind of claim for writers as Sarris was for directors, and Koch’s memories of Ophuls seemed to provide an excellent test case. Howard Koch, however, proved to be wonderfully even-handed. Still he began by taking a sideswipe at the simplifications of some of the French critics:

In recent years I’ve read with some bewilderment statements of French film directors such as Truffaut, identifying their methods with those of Max Ophuls, whom they regard as a sort of mentor and precursor of the New Wave. These directors are among the chief exponents of the auteur theory … which holds the director “authors” a film on the set and later in the cutting rooms with some small assist from a “dialogue writer”.

According to Koch, the creation of Letter from an Unknown Woman could not have been more different. The story was brought to him by John Houseman, an old friend from their time together with Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater on the Air. (Koch had scripted the famous War of the Worlds broadcast and Houseman had been co-producer.) Houseman wanted Koch to dramatise a novella by Stefan Zweig for a film in which Joan Fontaine would play the lead. One of the major stars of the period, she had formed her own company within Universal Pictures and had hired Houseman to produce.

The novella, or long short story, was in the form of a letter from the unnamed unknown woman of the title. It had been published in 1922 when Zweig was one of the most famous writers in the world. In 1947 he was still remembered, but as a Jewish anti-Nazi who had committed suicide with his wife five years earlier in despair at what seemed to them the impending destruction of Western civilisation. Zweig had always been a depressive and this shows in the morbidly romantic style of the short story. The “letter” is to a bon vivant author from a woman who had been in love with him since she was a young girl. They have one brief affair and she bears him a child. She keeps this from him and supports the boy by working as a courtesan. The anonymous lady admits to being very beautiful and by now the reader can’t escape feeling she is a confirmed emotional masochist: she gets what she deserves, or perhaps wants. There is a further meeting when the writer picks her up—she makes it very easy. Not recalling their previous meeting, at the end of the encounter he slips “two banknotes of high denomination” into her muff. The unknown woman decides not to reveal herself. The letter is written as a last farewell after their son has died of influenza and she is beginning to experience the same symptoms. The year of publication, 1922, coincided with the devastating post-war influenza epidemic.

Koch had his doubts about the story but allowed himself to be persuaded; then he suggested his friend Max Ophuls as director. Houseman was an admirer of Ophuls’s much-admired pre-war film Liebelei, and with a great deal of effort he persuaded the studio that Ophuls was right for the project. It was one of those happy series of accidents that occurred more often than is realised in the studio era.

Koch does not tell the full story of the making of the film. Indeed his article would have benefited if he had first been closely questioned by someone like Peter Bogdanovich who might have evoked further memories. But Koch does do justice to Ophuls’s role as director. Far from relying on inspiration during the shooting, he was painstaking about the creation of the screenplay. One delightful scene was Ophuls’s own invention. It shows the unknown woman and Stefan, her lover, dancing alone in a deserted ballroom accompanied by an all-woman orchestra. The inspiration came from research into late-nineteenth-century Vienna. Early in the production Ophuls had decided to place the action thirty years earlier than Zweig had in the novella.

Ophuls also transformed the writer into a concert pianist. A cliché of romantic cinema certainly, but it enables the film to give a fuller portrait of the woman’s “lover”. She hears his music as a girl when he practises in the upstairs apartment in the building where she lives with her mother, thus drawing her into his world. Later Koch and Ophuls have the heroine comment knowledgably on Stefan’s playing, and he exclaims, “Where have you been hiding—in my piano?” There is a double irony; she may be obsessed by the musician but he needs her more than he realises.

In the novella the device of having the main narrative in the form of a letter acts as a straitjacket. The reader has no idea what the unknown woman sees in the writer. In the film the attachment is all too believable. Stefan’s shallow charm, as played by Louis Jourdan, is appealing, and Koch and Ophuls added moments of vulnerability and despair that the actor plays with great subtlety. The character may be shallow but he knows it and is powerless to change. Fontaine gets the adolescent girl just about right and is heart-breaking as the woman in love.

The final sequences when the woman realises that she really is unknown to her would-be lover are a masterpiece of restrained screen acting from both performers. Stefan does not remember her and, oblivious to her anguish, elegantly sets about the seduction of yet another beautiful woman. Ophuls builds the scene around a series of close shots of Fontaine as she registers the character’s devastation.

The novella ends with the writer “breaking inside” but still only half-remembering his lover. For the film Koch and Ophuls devised a full-scale tragic ending. The letter is handed to Stefan as he returns to his apartment after being challenged to a duel from which he intends to flee. As in the novella, what follows is an extended flashback concluding with a note confirming the death of the unknown woman. In yet another irony the memories of the lost love now come to him portrayed in a tightly edited montage of images from their brief time together. The seconds arrive for the duel and he decides to accept the challenge.

From Koch’s account this richly textured narrative was created through a series of interactions between Ophuls, Koch, and a talented cast. They clearly both respected and enhanced Stefan Zweig’s original. Having the lover as a musician allows for the composer of the film score, Daniele Amfitheatrof, to interweave themes from Liszt, Schubert and Mozart. It may not be particularly original but it serves the drama well.

The visual style is certainly characteristic of Ophuls but the Austrian cinematographer Franz Planer was probably responsible for the deeply shadowed expressionist lighting of the rain-washed streets and the darkened stairwell leading to Stefan’s apartment. Ophuls’s famous use of elaborate tracking or dolly shots was not unique in 1940s Hollywood. John Farrow, best known for his action adventures, would include at least one extended sequence in each of his movies where the camera tracked or dollied to cover the action in a single take. Ophuls avoided any virtuoso display. The moving camera would be used to place his characters in their world. His images liberate the eyes of the viewers so they can see, for example, the life of a garrison town as Fontaine’s character walks to join her parents, revealing why she might want to escape from this world through her romantic adventure. As well the camera seems to crane over her shoulder as the girl watches Stefan bring his romantic conquest up the stairs for the night. The shot is duplicated when he brings the unknown woman back for one of their few nights of love.

Is this stylish work of late-1940s Hollywood relevant now or sentimental nostalgia? For me it is both. Letter from an Unknown Woman embodies a full-blown romanticism that remains appealing, as the popularity of the excellent DVD release shows. But the emotions and the tragedy—Stefan’s carelessness and sexual indulgence, the woman’s slightly absurd ardour—are only too real and moving. The film’s delicate ironies are at once aesthetically satisfying and, as the full tragedy unfolds, cathartic. Fortunately there was more to come from Max Ophuls both in America and Europe which, as they are released to DVD, I hope to make the subject of another article.

By a sad irony, as I was researching this piece the news came of the death of Louis Jourdan at ninety-three. Last year we lost his co-star Joan Fontaine. Postings on the internet warmly remember them both. In 2010 a frail, dignified Jourdan was awarded the Legion of Honour.

As can be seen in Letter to an Unknown Woman there was more to the actor than a dashing screen presence. His elegant boulevardier in Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi is always believable, as is his tragic French aristocrat in the British period drama Dangerous Exile. There was always a sense that even in his most lightweight roles he had more to offer than was being asked of him. We can be grateful to directors such as Ophuls, Minnelli and Alfred Hitchcock (who used him to great effect in The Paradine Case), that this fine actor was able at times to realise his full potential.