Like Fritz Lang alongside him, Max Ophuls saw his career fall into a three act structure - European beginnings, Hollywood middle stretch, and then an ironic return to the post-Nazi continent, which is where Ophuls's profile has grown most extravagantly. From La Ronde (1950) to his last, Lola Montes (1955), Ophuls orchestrated a new kind of ironic, mega-cinematic eye-candy, full of dizzying wide-screen costume opulence and compositions so baroque that Andrew Sarris once claimed that Lola was the greatest film ever made. Today, Ophuls's reputation rests largely on these gigantic butterflies, when it's not in fact wresting happily on his twin femme-noir Hollywood home-runs of 1949, Caught and The Reckless Moment. But there is an ever-growing contingent of Ophulsians who step over both of these formidable filmography territories, and bask in the gaslight nimbus of a single film, Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Ophuls's 17th film but his first true masterpiece (beginning a seven-film run of nothing but masterpieces, ending only with his premature death at 54), Letter is a Hollywood film but closer in spirit to his later French romances than to his other American melodramas. In fact, its timeless sense of Proustian Euro-lostness is essentially unique, making it a film experience that writes its own narrative rules and crafts its own ideas of fate and l'amour fou.

Ophuls's turn-of-the-century Vienna is a densely detailed and intoxicating studio creation, contrived on the old Universal backlot (some sets probably left over from the Frankenstein films of the '30s). If you're familiar with the efforts of Hollywood in the '30s and '40s at recreating classical European milieus, you see the difference this savvy Viennese makes right away - it's a film intimately involved with the cluttered rooms, nightened avenues and shadowy staircases of this mythical city-of-the-heart. No serious cinephile can afford to underappreciate Ophuls's mise-en-scene and masterly evocation of film space, even if Letter never launches into the tracking-shot stratosphere as his later films do. The story, written by Hollywood vet Howard Koch from a Stefan Zweig novella, is its own brand of hyper-romantic myth: a gangly teen (Joan Fontaine) becomes instantly obsessed with a dashing concert pianist (Louis Jourdan) who has moved into her building. He dismisses her, and she moves away to Linz with her family - but as she grows, her ardor never fades, leading her to turn down suitors, leave her family to find work in Vienna, and essentially stalk the pianist, who is such a narcissistic libertine that when he meets the girl again years later, he doesn't recognize her, but seduces her in any case. Then he leaves without a thought - and this tragic pattern, of undying obsession met with brutal indifference and masculine ego, continues for decades, ending at a death bed in a typhus ward, with the mysteries of time and love disappearing like steam in the air.

Fontaine's dizzily dedicated heroine is only "unknown" to the obscure object of her desire because he cannot repay her love - he meets her several times, woos and makes love to her and even impregnates her, but never remembers her one decade to the next amid the whorl of fame, womanizing and drink in which he lives. If you allow it, the plot can seem far-fetched - wouldn't you recognize someone you had sex with just ten years afterward? - but this single leap of logic, coupled with the heroine's unassailable passion, constitutes the movie's unique personality. Everything here is played in the key of heartbreak; his extreme degree of thoughtless self-absorption is matched only by her selflessness. The fact that the heroine's dogged refusal to surrender her unfounded devotion to such a useless man can sometimes scan like an illness, a delusional psychosis, is certainly in keeping with the story's thrust, as well as epitomizing all things Romanticist. Certainly, the conceptual structure of Zweig's story makes Ophuls's film one of the few Hollywood films to take the concept of Sturm und Drang seriously. If you cannot put all of your faith in what you love, what other point is there to life?

Or is Fontaine's protagonist a fantasist, unfairly and unwisely occupying a feverish world of her own creation? Reach further, and you have a parable about the failures of memory, and even about Alzheimer's, manifested as a universal condition of trying to live while those you value most forget who you are. Such a dreamy, self-destructive premise requires conviction, and Fontaine is faultless. Normally a rather placid and mannered actress, Fontaine can underwhelm when she wasn't being guided and manipulated by Alfred Hitchcock, in Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), into producing two of cinema's greatest portraits of persecution and neurotic unease. Some actors require strong directors, and Ophuls might well have been another decisive influence on Fontaine, who first wows as an utterly convincing late-pubertal teen, full of quick steps and guileless stares, inhabiting a body that still thinks it's a girl. Later, Fontaine underplays her heroine's headlong swooniness with such restraint you're aware that while she may be in fact more than a little compulsive-crazy, she's also smart enough to not to expose her feelings to the world. In a cosmic-romance scenario about the injustice of true love, Fontaine's tentative reserve makes the unreasonable seem inevitable.

Still, it's Ophuls's movie; his tender empathy and respect for the ideals of romance and for womanhood give the film a tragic glow. Only in an Ophuls film would you have the bewitching set-piece of two lovers going on a "voyage" in a stationary train car, as a sideshow-arcade proprietor shuttles a fake backdrop of landscapes, over and over again, outside their window. Chosen early as one of the first hundred films to be selected and preserved by the National Film Registry, it's a totem movie, one of those emotionally reckless films that attract the ardent devotion of certain filmgoers and are never in danger of tarnishing with the years.

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by Michael Atkinson