Letter from an Unknown Woman

At least three times in Max Ophuls (credited as Max "Opuls") 1948 Hollywood "weeper", Letter from an Unknown Woman, the director's moving camera glides through walls, moving from outside to inside, not necessarily tracking a character's entrance into a building, but rather demonstrating the omniscience of the mechanism documenting (perhaps, even governing) the narrative.  Some hardworking graduate student should identify scenes in which camera's penetrate notional walls im American cinema and assess what these images are supposed to mean and how they affect viewers.  In Ophuls' film, the camera tracking through walls reminds me of the old-fashioned narrators who populate fiction in the 18th and 19th century, figures who invite you to sit down while they tamp tobacco into their pipes, assuring you that they are about to tell you a tale that is, not only, fascinating but also completely true, a story for which they can vouch as they spin the yarn, winking at you with an avuncular air from within wreathes of companionable smoke.  The notion, I think, is that I am going to transport you now, as if on seven-league boots, to some remarkable places.

At the beginning of Letter a caddish roue has been challenged to a duel.  The man's companions know that he will leave town before the fight:  "others can afford honor," the libertine says to his valet, as he orders  him to pack his things.  But the most imposing aspect of this introductory sequence, the frame to film's story, is the annex to the cad's Vienna apartment:  beyond the curb and front door, the space opens  into a high narrow stairwell in which an art nouveau stairway spirals up to a lofty landing at least forty feet above the entry.  At the landing, another flight of steps that looks chiseled out of granite ascends into dark shadows to some unseen garret above.  The camera re-positions and angles itself upward to show the anti-hero, a Lothario and concert pianist named Stefan Brand climbing those stairs -- it takes Brand a considerable time to trudge up to his apartment and the camera records his whole ascent.  We wonder why time is wasted in this way -- but, as it turns out, the steps, viewed from various angles, is one of the key locations where action will occur in the film.  Climbing and descending the steps doesn't necessarily have metaphoric or symbolic significance (Freud thought steps signified sexual arousal and Ophuls is Viennese but this would be a distinctly secondary meaning for the set -- the work of the brilliant Alexander Golitzen.)  Ophuls likes the stairwell because it imparts visual interest to sequences filmed there.

A little later, a character enters a cafe from a snowy street.  The door to the cafe is located at a streetcorner in Vienna (the Stefansdom is visible against the shadowy night sky on the horizon).  To reach the streetcorner, characters have to trudge up a steep ramp -- the sidewalks tilts upward to the intersection.  Once in the cafe, there is a landing but the tables are fifteen feet below the grade of the entrance, reached by another flight of stairs -- so you climb an exterior ramp to go into the cafe which turns out to be below you, down another set of stairs.  The elevation changes are wholly gratuitous but when traversed by characters, impart to us a sense of actual motion through a real, as opposed to, fictional space.  

Ophuls has the habit of complicating the location where important events occur.  A scene at an opera involves loggia, a box overlooking the stage, and a complicated marble stairway flanked by statues that leads like an opening fan down to the main entrance to the building.  (It's at the opera that the heroine sees her beloved, the man who has ruled her life, and been absent ten years.)  Outside the opera's lobby, there is an intricate portico of Doric columns, not just one group of them but several close to the door and, then, pushed out on the entrance porch to the edge of another set of stairs leading to the carriages waiting on the street.  The space between the Doric columns is further complicated by two large sphinxes mounted on the stone parapets adjacent to the exterior stair.  This is the place where the  heroine, Lisa Berndt, will meet her unfaithful and negligent lover and plan to escape from her marriage to be with him -- even though she seems to be happily married to a rich military officer.  Earlier, we have seen the heroine refusing to give up her baby son in the charity hospital in which she has just given birth -- the child is the cad, Stefan Brand's son, the result of the protagonist's one and only romantic encounter.  This location is particularly fraught -- the camera starts by peering into a long gloomy corridor in which a ghostly nun with an elaborate white wimple is approaching the camera, a bit like a vampire bat.  The camera tracks to the side passing through a wall into a strangely intimate and provisional space, a group of cells defined by hanging curtains, passing by one column of cells and, then, into a cubbyhole-like space at the head of a second group cells all veiled by curtain; in her niche,  the heroine is lying on a bed, confronted, now, it seems by the nun we saw in the corridor outside this odd cavern-like labyrinth of small chambers.  This interior space seems distinctly female, the location of parturition which, somehow, is associated with the cloth partitions in the ward.  Later, when Lisa's husband declares that he will take action to preserve his honor and keep her from going with the caddish pianist, he poses ominously in front of a display of swords and sabers.

Letter from an Unknown Woman is a prestige melodrama, marred, I think, by Joan Fontaine's casting as the doomed heroine, Lisa.  Fontaine has to show us Lisa as a fourteen-year old girl in the opening scenes establishing her infatuation with Stefan Brand, the dissipated concert pianist.  (She is the oldest-looking fourteen year old in cinema history.)  Fontaine isn't visually interesting although she's in the center of some of the most lavish decor in film history.  The cad, Stefan Brand is played by Louis Jordain in an impressive performance -- Jordain is ridiculously handsome in the scenes in which he seduces Lisa; later, when they meet ten years after he has made her pregnant, his eyes are dull and dead.  The movie traffics in one of the oldest and most noxious tropes in narrative -- a mother is punished for sexual infidelity by the death of her child.  The picture is predictable on all levels, although very well written.  About 20% of the film is taken up with the extended date scene in which the pianist and his prey, Lisa, wander around snowy Vienna, including a visually impressive sequence in which the characters sit across from one another in a simulated rail car while landscapes of Venice or the Alps are scrolled by them in the  car's simulated window in panorama form -- an old guy on fixed bicycle powers the moving panoramas.  The film is primarily interesting as an exploration of female obsession -- it's similar in some ways, although not as uncompromising, as Truffaut's The Story of Adele H--, about Victor Hugo's daughter and her fatal obsession with a man who has no interest in her.  Earlier I used the word "prey" to describe Joan Fontaine's character, Lisa.  The terms is inexact -- here the seducer turns out to be the prey.  Lisa gets exactly what she wants in this film -- including her own romantic and morbid death.  This is probably one of the most important melodramas from Hollywood's great decade --the film certainly transcends it's genre.  Yet it also feels compromised to me -- the imagery is too explicit in the final five minutes of the movie:  the hero even sees a ghostly Lisa, who has now died as well, superimposed upon the locations where they once met.   There's a hint, that I dislike, that the death of poor mad Lisa is a sacrifice that somehow redeems the caddish and careless Stefan, a sacrifice that restores some semblance of honor to him (presumably he will killed in the duel).  Ophuls later European films are more cynical and, I think, somewhat better than this Hollywood picture.  (Those films are Lola Montez, Le Plaisir, La Ronde,and The Earrings of Madame D--., all of them masterpieces.)  The romantically surging score is orchestrated from Franz Liszt's etude Un Sospiro ("A Sigh").