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CV: Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)
One of the Top 100.
She's called Lisa Berndle and she's played by Joan Fontaine at ages 8, 18 and 30. Some ages are more convincing than others, but that's because this melodrama suckers you into taking it as realism.
In 1900 a composer, Stefan Brand, is about to leave Vienna because he has been challenged to a duel he knows he will lose. He is brought an unsigned letter by his butler, which announces the writer is probably dead and recounts her life story - how she first saw him when she was a child, their fling and then a reunion a decade later. Again there are two questions to answer - why she didn't try to see him a third time rather more quickly (she clearly likes to suffer) and why he didn't remember her (he clearly picks up so many women that he's long since forgotten her - and he clearly doesn't know whose husband is challenging him to a duel). He probably isn't even a brilliant pianist - we only have her word for it.
A rare film that focuses on the woman's point of view only - well, she's not exactly mad, but she knows her own mind, remakes the world in that image, and is eventually punished for it. Fontaine is very good - in Rebecca and Suspicion she also plays women driven to distraction by their perceptions, which may or may not turn out to be true. Louis Jordan, also a graduate of Hitchcock (The Paradine Case, which I've never seen), is almost given the appearance of a 1930s vampire, and is certainly predatory. The film raises more questions than it answers - but pretty well everyone is punished for the actions of the central coupling.
Totals: 105 (Cinema: 41; DVD: 59; TV: 5)
One of the Top 100.
She's called Lisa Berndle and she's played by Joan Fontaine at ages 8, 18 and 30. Some ages are more convincing than others, but that's because this melodrama suckers you into taking it as realism.
In 1900 a composer, Stefan Brand, is about to leave Vienna because he has been challenged to a duel he knows he will lose. He is brought an unsigned letter by his butler, which announces the writer is probably dead and recounts her life story - how she first saw him when she was a child, their fling and then a reunion a decade later. Again there are two questions to answer - why she didn't try to see him a third time rather more quickly (she clearly likes to suffer) and why he didn't remember her (he clearly picks up so many women that he's long since forgotten her - and he clearly doesn't know whose husband is challenging him to a duel). He probably isn't even a brilliant pianist - we only have her word for it.
A rare film that focuses on the woman's point of view only - well, she's not exactly mad, but she knows her own mind, remakes the world in that image, and is eventually punished for it. Fontaine is very good - in Rebecca and Suspicion she also plays women driven to distraction by their perceptions, which may or may not turn out to be true. Louis Jordan, also a graduate of Hitchcock (The Paradine Case, which I've never seen), is almost given the appearance of a 1930s vampire, and is certainly predatory. The film raises more questions than it answers - but pretty well everyone is punished for the actions of the central coupling.
Totals: 105 (Cinema: 41; DVD: 59; TV: 5)
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