Letter from an Unknown Woman

Imagine yourself in 1900s Vienna among the glamour, the ritz and sweet seductive Viennese street tunes. Picture yourself falling in love with Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan careening along the cobbled streets under a sparkling moonlit sky.

Ophuls' dreamlike fantasy into young love and heartache melts your heart and tantalises the most romantic in each us. The story is told in flashback by Fontaine and covers her accession from lust the true love then longing and regret. The events of the story are unfolded to us through Fontaine's final letter written to Jourdan. We discover how the lovely couple met and what resulted in them breaking away and returning to love.

The film takes us through the opulence of the rich, elegant society parties, family dynamics, and the adversities of fame and married life. The story is basically a set a flashbacks of their love together, their defining moments and their crises.

Ophuls moves the piece along in a gliding, swooning fashion. There are many wonderful shots and movements between the glistening Viennese apartments and their opulent decorations. A lot of the film is very dark, set during twilight and after midnight, and Ophuls frames each scene perfectly with the intimate symmetry of light and shadows. He is outstanding with the interiors and glass reflections; the shine of street lamps and candlelight to create a truly romantic dreamworld.

Both Fontaine and Jourdan are excellent. Together they are romantic, suave and mystical. Fontaine in particular was radiant and youthful. She shines in each scene among the darkness and sumptuous sets. The story begins with her as a coy and bashful young woman. She develops into a girl longing for love, in a state of dreamy affection to a stunningly elegant and always struggling against her desires and duties.

As a avid lover of fine music, I loved the sensual score and scenes of Jourdan rippling over the piano producing a dreamlike flowing theme. The scene at the opera was also a real treat and heartbreaking to see the principals recapturing long lost love and idealistic memories.

This is a superb melodrama about lost love and admitting that when the right love comes, we can only be so naive and captivated by the beauty of it. It was lovely to fall in and out of love with Fontaine and Jourdan, remembering that love is a desire worth waiting on.

Based on Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's novella 'Brief Einer Unbekannten', Ophuls uses all his creativity at disposal to enable his technicians to capture the cowardice of men and vulnerability of women. It is not only the leading pair who serves as a good example of cowards and vulnerable people. There are also some secondary characters who provide fitting description to words such as coward and vulnerable. The names of the woman's mother and her husband come to mind to provide a suitable description. In 'Letter from an unknown woman', Max Ophuls celebrates the immense power of a letter to convey feelings of disappointment arising out of a failed love affair. The letter in question is quite a long one. It was drafted by a woman to tell her doomed life to her lover. Ophuls depicts all the troubles which a woman is compelled to take in order to get love. It would not be wrong to state that love is out of fashion in current times. It has been replaced by something which resembles love but has a certain amount of physical force. There were times in the past when intense feelings of love were appreciated. 'Letter from an unknown woman" is one such film which has the ability to transport viewers to a time when love mattered a lot.

An admirable scene sums up the whole movie:Stefan and Liza are aboard a "train" and they "travel".It's actually a fixed train,and some kind of stagehand forwards a chocolate box scenery :Venice ,Switzerland... In the real world ,trains are ominous messengers of death and despair:it's a train which takes Stefan away after their affair,a train which takes the young boy to his death.

Stefan (Jourdan)lives his selfish life without seeing anything.Ophuls(spelled Opuls in the cast and credits) shows him as a handsome nice young man,but if you look with care,you'll notice it's always Liza(Fontaine)who's looking at him with love.Jourdan seems to care but actually he knows so many women that he acts as if he's in a play:Liza's admiration means nothing to him who is a ladykiller-see the scene when Liza comes back from the station- and a celebrated musician adulated by the crowds.Liza is the romantic woman,with a zest of touch of Madame Bovary thrown in -it's not a coincidence if Minnelli chose Jourdan as Madame Bovary's lover in his eponymous movie the very same year-For her,there must be only one love ,and she's prepared to give it all.

Joan Fontaine had perhaps never been so good as here.Her whole life ,as she writes her letter (the movie is a flashback ) could have been written in the past conditional.Main influence is certainly that of John Stahl and his "only yesterday" (1933)in which Margaret Sullavan wrote John Boles such a letter.Even the young boy is present in both movies.The last page of the letter,ink-stained (or tear-stained?)takes the audience to a peak of emotion.The final predates the ending of Ophuls's "Madame de" (1953),and the scene on the "train" ,an imitation of life ,the big circus of "Lola Montes" (1955)

This is probably Louis Jourdan's best part as well.A French actor,he was never that much popular in his native country ,and he found his best parts in the US ,be it artistically (Ophuls ,Hitchcock and Minnelli) or commercially (Octopussy) speaking.

Over a period of years, a young woman is gripped by a romantic obsession with tragic results.

Despite the heavy romantic overlay, the movie strikes me as a one-of-a-kind noir. In fact, the production contains a number of noirish earmarks. Consider the foreboding nighttime atmosphere of so many scenes; also, the heavy sense of doom surrounding Lisa's obsession; then there's Stefan's seductive charm, a kind of spiderman in reverse. And while there's no crime in the legal sense, Stefan does commit a moral crime that leaves Lisa emotionally destitute. Nothing significant hangs on this classification, but it is a way of likening Lisa's predicament to noir's typically doomed characters and the dark universe they inhabit.

Noir or not, the movie bears the clear stamp of an artistic sensibility thanks to director Ophuls, along with expert art design, set design, and cinematography. It's these formal qualities that lift the material above conventional soap opera. And though the screenplay seems pretty implausible at times, the device of the letter and Stefan's response to it create a beautifully rounded morality tale. Of course, having a 30-year old Fontaine play a teenager in the opening scenes is a stretch; however, Ophuls manages to finesse, using long and medium shots instead of revealing close-ups. Despite the difficult challenge, Fontaine manages to bring off her evolving role in persuasive fashion.

All in all, the movie remains an exquisite combination of European sensibility and Hollywood professionalism. Together they produce an unforgettable visual and emotional experience that successfully challenges the condescending label of "a woman's picture".

This movie is really great in how it conjures up so much tasteful melodrama through its structure and the unique way in that the main characters spend less time on screen together interacting than they do just being painfully tragic.

I really enjoy the structure of the piece, through the title letter which gives a sense of dated urgency if that makes any sense. We read along with the man who also doesn't not really know the whole story, and so we see through her eyes in a fresh sense his being while discovering the story along with him. It is an interesting way of making the movie. Fontaine is wonderfully vulnerable and believable as a woman who tries and tries and tries and matures and regresses through decades of life. My favorite part of course is the lovely "train ride" through different vistas, its cutesy but also a comment on how their romance is so supercilious to him but everything to her, in a fake box car. Depression may occur after viewing this film.