Letter from an Unknown Woman

Sometimes you watch a film dealing with the story of a romance and the filmmaker will be content enough to reside in the realm of melodrama, of heightened emotions serving a tale of doomed romance - or maybe it won't turn 'doomed' per-say, but the stakes are always so monumental, incredible and just downright heightened that some in the audience may need handkerchiefs for their un-dry eyes and noses. For Max Ophuls, going past melodrama was a key thing.

A pianist about to flee from a duel receives a letter from a woman he cannot remember, who may hold the key to his downfall.What a very strange film.

Max Ophuls' Letter from an Unknown Woman is one of Hollywood's most deeply beautiful creations, because its beauty draws on that of cinema itself: the eternally addictive mystery of a projection that entirely captivates and shapes us while it's playing, but then starts immediately to fade, inevitably becoming lost. In this case, the spectator is Louis Jourdan's Stefan Brand, a gifted concert pianist and hopeless skirt-chaser, who bewitches Joan Fontaine's Lisa Berndle through her entire adult life, and at one point spends a magical day and night with her during which he pronounces himself captivated and impregnates her, but then forgets, remembering only when it's too late.

Letter from an Unknown Woman is directed by Max Ophuls, who also co- adapts the screenplay with Howard Koch from the novella written by Stefan Zweig. It stars Joan Fontaine, Louis Jordan, Mady Christians, Art Smith and Howard Freeman.

I enjoy old B&W films but this was frankly disappointing. Not much else to say.

There is nothing quite like unrequited love to focus the attention. As Somerset Maugham once said, "The love that lasts the longest, is the love that is never returned".

There have been dozens of films about unrequited love, about heartbreak, about the lives of two individuals taking different paths...and there will continue to be, but "Letter from an Unknown Woman" stands above all of them.

Letter from an Unknown Woman has the classic recipe for a romantic drama – the early stages of infatuation, the eventual realization of mutual feelings, and finally, heartbreak. However, the film uses this typical template in an over-the-top fashion to the point of making the film a dramatic clichéd romance flick.

While Letter from an Unknown Woman by Max Ophüls might have been a revolutionary movie in 1948 now it is a rather generic love story. The movie takes place in Vienna Austro-Hungarian Empire and is actually a story within a story starting with a man, whom is a pianist named Stefan Brand, being sidetracked from fleeing a dual as he reads a letter by a woman who does not give her name.