Max Ophüls

The Earrings of Madame de…

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The general and his wife in all their finery

Light-hearted, ironic, passionate, frivolous, lush, beautifully made and full of little jokes, The Earrings of Madame de… is the sort of self-consciously filmic film that film-makers love but audiences are less enthusiastic about. It was a favourite of Kubrick. Douglas Sirk described it as perfect. When it got its Criterion Collection release Paul Thomas Anderson did the spoken introduction. New York Observer critic Andrew Yarris referred to it as the Greatest Film of All Time. Even if you don’t rate it quite so highly, it’s undeniably exquisitely made. This was director Max Ophüls back in Europe after a sojourn in Hollywood, and he’s definitely off the leash. His final four European films – La … Read more

Sans Lendemain

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Edwige Feuillère as Evelyn

When the name Max Ophüls comes up, Sans Lendemain isn’t the first film most people think of. That would probably be Lola Montès, or La Ronde, or Letters from an Unknown Woman. But this 1939 outlier is distinctively Ophüls, a superb if small film, knotty in theme, beautiful in look and with a great performance by its female star, Edwige Feuillère. Ophüls was born Maximillian Oppenheimer and was a German Jew who fled the Nazis in 1933, made a few films in France, before fleeing the Nazis again in 1941, to America, where he never got quite the platform he deserved. Fellow directors like Preston Sturges championed him – partly because his lavish … Read more

Caught

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Leonora is consoled by Dr Quinada

Revenge would be a better title but Caught it is, director Max Ophüls’s broadside against Howard Hughes, who’d fired him from Vendetta only days into shooting a film that was meant to launch the career of Faith Domergue, a Hughes “discovery” (booty division). Vendetta ended up with five directors’ names attached to it so clearly the launch needed more grease on the slipway than anticipated. Hughes’s treatment of women, it turns out, is what Caught is all about, a reworking of the Libbie Block novel Wild Calendar also incorporating the stories Ophüls and screenwriter Arthur Laurents had heard about the infamously philandering studio boss. Naive and nice young thing Leonora (Barbara Bel Geddes) … Read more

The Reckless Moment

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James Mason and Joan Bennett

Melodrama lush and silk-wrapped in The Reckless Moment, a typically opulent film from Max Ophüls, billed almost inevitably as Max Opuls in the four films he made in the USA, of which this was the last. He’s best known for Lola Montes and La Ronde, and for a strange fascination with female characters whose name began with the letter L (it was Léocadie, played by Simone Signoret, in La Ronde, no prizes for guessing who it was in Lola Montes). Lucia is his L of a gal in The Reckless Moment, Joan Bennett showing what an all-rounder she was in a role that’s several rungs up the social ladder and a moral universe … Read more