FILM SCREENING I | STEFAN ZWEIG | Max Ophüls: LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN

1948, 86 minutes, 35mm. With Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan. Preserved print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

The best-known – and the finest – film adapted from Stefan Zweig’s work is this Max Ophüls masterpiece, made during his 1940s Hollywood sojourn. Based on Zweig’s 1922 novella, it is the bitter, tragic, but sumptuously filmed tale of a callow pianist who receives a letter from a woman he fails to remember, despite her all-consuming, life-long love for him.

“[Though] closely identified with particularly Ophülsian themes and style…it was not initiated by him but by the independent producer William Dozier, who had long admired the Zweig novella and saw it as a perfect vehicle for his wife, Joan Fontaine. It was also perfect for Ophüls, allowing him to return to one of his preferred themes: adulterous love. … With the character of Stefan, the repetitive compulsion of the seducer fuses with the repetitive activity of the pianist and washes over the aesthetic of the film itself, with its own repeated cinematic and narrative motifs.” –Laura Mulvey

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