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Letter from an Unknown Woman 7 June 04

Section: article

Categories: Film / in-a-cinema

This is a sad love story based on the novel Brief einer Unbekannten by Stefan Zweig. It takes place mostly in Vienna, though it was filmed in Hollywood with richly evocative sets, showing many interiors of apartments and the city streets at night. For me there was a pervasive awareness of it all having been realized on sets, and in that context the film opens up poetically in one key scene where the two main characters go to an amusement stand where they sit in a simulated train compartment with the window looking out on a large scroll of charcoal rendered views—on white paper that was like sunlight—showing panoramas of European cities rolling by, paying a fee per city, and being driven by an elderly man on a stationary bicycle (possibly the inspiration for REM’s video of Shiny Happy People?).

Joan Fontaine plays a woman from her teens to her early thirties—she would have been about 30 during the making of this film, in which she is wonderful.

The male lead, Louis Jourdan, was a familiar face, appearing years later in An American in Paris in 1958 and Count Dracula in 1977. Looking into his history was interesting after just having seen Un condamné à mort s’est échappé: Jourdan, a French actor, refused to act for the Nazis and joined the Underground. Obviously, he later worked in Hollywood.

The director Max Ophüls is the father of the documentary film-maker Marcel Ophüls, born here in Frankfurt, and known for the powerful film The Sorrow and the Pity, among others.

Title: Letter from an Unknown Woman

Directed by: Max Opuls (that was how his name was listed in the credits)

Written by: Howard Koch, Max Opuls

Based on the novel by: Stefan Zweig

Starring: Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan, Mady Christians, Marcel Journet, Carol Yorke, and more

Year: 1948

Cinematography: Franz Planer

Original music by: Daniele Amfitheatrof

Non-original music: Franz Liszt, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Richard Wagner

Art direction by: Alexander Golitzen

Set decoration by: Russell A. Gausman, Ruby R. Levitt

Language: English

Cinema: Filmmuseum, Frankfurt

  • Title: Letter from an Unknown Woman