Born the 6th of May 1902 in Sarrebrueck Germany, Max Ophuls grew up in a family of industrials. In 1920, he started a career on stage as an actor and a stage director before he ventured into cinema in 1930 with Anatol Litvak, as a dialoguist. Libelei, which he directed in 1933, made him famous in France where he moved to when Nazis took control over Germany. He directed several films in France (Werther in 1938, adapted from Goethe) and moved to the United States in 1940 and spent there years before starting to work again. He directed then, among other things, Letter From an Unknown Woman in 1948 and Caught in 1949. Back to France in 1950, he directed the four masterpieces gathered now in a wonderful 4-disc boxset: La Ronde (1950), Pleasure (1952), The Earrings of Madame De… (1953) and Lola Montes (1955).

Virtuoso long shots, sumptuous tracking, superb frame compositions, the direction by Ophuls is a pleasure for the senses. Although he used to say “I have no style“, Ophuls did obviously have one and it was stunningly beautiful and elegant. “A move in the tracking can express drama better than dialogues“, the filming serves the plot and follows the emotions of the characters. If the films of Max Ophuls are fascinating in the way they are made, they also are rich in their themes and pretty bold. Women have the central place, mostly fighting against their social fate and often going away from the stereotypes of the time. From Madame De to the prostitutes of Pleasure, the female characters of Ophuls are complex -a complexity inherited from the adapted novels but yet reinforced by the director’s work– whereas the men are often summed up to their social function. Women are a source of fascination and mystery, they are filmed with love. Amongst other notable things, we can point out the role of sexual pleasure, totally assumed, which caused the original X-rating of Pleasure in the United Kingdom. Behind the social masks, blood flows and passion overwhelms.

From his theatre background, Ophuls keeps a taste for the world of spectacle. The narrator of La Ronde links it to the stage and the brothels can be seen as theatres of artificial seductions. The high society of Madame De is also a stage of appearances. Ophuls also develops a form that will become highly fashionable in the 1960s in Europe, the sketches film.

These themes and tendencies are all in the accursed masterpiece of Ophuls, a scandal by the time of its release and a victim of rough editing by its producers, Lola Montes. The film depicts the life of a notorious courtesan, mistress of the King of Bavaria, who becomes, literaly, a circus attraction. Re-enacted on stage, her life -with flashbacks for the film viewer- becomes a spectacle of decadence. The talent of the director explodes in extraordinary colours and sounds with a stunning choreographic direction in Cinemascope. A tragic destiny magnified during the beautiful circus sequences, Lola Montes was the masterpiece of the director, who was deeply wounded by the film commercial failure. Back to Germany two years later just before his death, Ophuls went for a last run on stage -the starting and ending point of a unique body of work of a considerable importance, which influenced people like Martin Scorsese, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard or Stanley Kubrick.

Francis Chérasse

More information about :
La Ronde
Pleasure
The Earrings of Madame De…
Lola Montes