No director made films more beautifully than Max Ophuls, and no other filmmaker seems to have suffered as much in critical esteem for it. To his critics, an Ophuls film is like a Viennese banquet built around a box of take-out éclairs: all virtuoso tracking shots and thrilling long takes, trying desperately to cover up the lack of any substantial literary meat-and-potatoes.It certainly is easy to be distracted by the beauty of the presentation and miss the profundity at the center of Ophuls’ work, but there is a critic at the heart of the confectioner and a bitter pill at the center of every Ophuls truffle. He made some of the most beautiful social critiques ever filmed, and if it seems perverse of him to pretty up his cultural criticism, it’s probably wise to remember the observation of social philosopher Mary Poppins: a spoonful of sugar does help the medicine go down.
A German by birth, a Frenchman by choice, and multinational by necessity, from 1930 to 1955 Ophuls made movies in Germany, Italy, Austria, Holland, Hollywood, and France. His favorite setting for a movie was turn-of-the-century Vienna, but it could as well have been anywhere the wealthy or powerful man prowled. His favorite subject was the woman unhappily and unproductively in love with one of the prowlers.
For this his work was often deemed inconsequential. A remark by film scholar Roy Armes is typical of this school of thought: “Max Ophuls was a man of wide cultural interests and had a deep respect for literature, yet the characteristic of his subject matter is its triviality. It is not by chance that his last film in the USA was from a Ladies’ Home Journal story, for Ophuls’ subject matter is the beautiful but unhappy woman.”
Beautiful but unhappy women do figure prominently in the Ophuls canon: In Liebelei, a Viennese musician’s daughter falls in love with a soldier who becomes a victim of a military code that forces him to fight a duel; La Signora di Tutti chronicles the life of an actress destroyed by her relationship with an older man in love with her; Joan Fontane in Letter from an Unknown Woman carries a torch for a dissolute musician (Vienna, again) until the day she dies; in The Earrings of Madame de... a woman dies of a broken heart; the list goes on and on. (There’s even a hint in From Mayerling to Sarajevo that the real tragedy of the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife was not that World War One followed as a result, but that a love affair had been cut short.)
Yet it’s tough to see the Ophuls woman unhappily in love as trivial. Take, for example, Caught. Caught (a word that could serve as the title of most of his films) finds Ophuls in 1948 Hollywood doing film noir, which turns out to be a very happy combination: The in-your-face cynicism of the genre brings the social critic into the open; the director’s feverish camerawork raises the emotional temperature to delirious levels.
Caught is sort of a wife’s-eye-view Citizen Kane: Proletarian Leonora Ames models mink coats in a department store and dreams of one day marrying a millionaire. Through circumstances too strange and delightful to go into here, she gets her wish, only to realize that her husband is a vicious control-freak bent on destroying all those around him. (Critic David Thompson claims that Howard Hughes actually gave Robert Ryan advice on how to portray his sociopathic multimillionaire.)
Ultimately, Leonora leaves her husband and her mink-coat lifestyle behind, and finds fulfillment working as a pediatrician’s assistant in a poor neighborhood. (Women in this movie achieve happiness only when their lives find expression through their labor.) Far from feeling frivolous, there are times when Caught feels like it might have been directed by Chairman Mao—that is, if the Great Helmsman could have learned to use a dolly.
Lola Montes (1955) is rather a more baroque matter. Based on the life of a real character who counted among her lovers Franz Liszt and the king of Bavaria, Lola Montes was to be Ophuls’ last film, and an apotheosis of his favorite themes. It was also shockingly modern—a film about filmmaking, a biography about biographies and a statement that we are all mere actors in the theater of our lives.
A circus ringmaster steps into the spotlight and cracks his whip. “Ladies and Gentlemen” he shouts. “The most sensational act of the century! Spectacle! Romance! Action! A creature a hundred times more wild than any beast in our menagerie! A monster of cruelty with the eyes of an angel! Ravaged hearts! Squandered fortunes! A sarabande of lovers! An authentic revolution! Passion and glory! Triumph and perdition! Ladies and gentlemen, Lola Montes—in the flesh!” Curtains part and over the next 110 minutes, we see more or less all of the above, some of it performed on a tightrope and a trapeze. (Lola’s version of what happened: “I simply do as I please.”)
The movie’s formal conceit is so riveting that when it’s all over it’s hard to remember whether anything important went on in its subject’s life. And as with many reinventions of cinema, it’s hard not to find a little sympathy for the complaint of Stuart Klawans, who in Film Follies points out the gap between Lola’s philosophical content and lavishness of its presentation: “The true scandal of Lola Montes is that Ophuls had sneaked something no bigger than a garden folly into a production of World’s Fair Proportions.”
But, critical fashions change. What 40 years ago would have been the defect of self-indulgency is now the virtue self-referentiality. Today, Lola Montes is one of the indispensable works of world cinema precisely because it’s a visit to that world’s fair. If Lola Montes had been the only film he’d ever made, his critics would be right: Max Ophuls would be the Claudia Schiffer of filmmakers, content wildly outstripped by looks.
As it is, Lola Montes merely caps a body of work where spectacle and opulence and cinematic bravura are always held in check by a great sadness about the fleeting nature of love and happiness in the modern world. “Who am I?” the director asks at the opening of La Ronde. “The author? The narrator...? I am you—I am the personification of your desire to know everything. People always know only one side of reality because they see only one side of things. But I see every aspect. I see from every side....”
Ophuls’ career of seeing from every side was, at 25 years, tragically too short: The chronicler of broken hearts died of heart disease at 54. François Truffaut wrote in his 1957 Cahiers du Cinema obituary: “For some of us, Max Ophuls was the best French filmmaker, along with Jean Renoir. Our loss is immense, the loss of a Balzacian artist who was an advocate of his heroines, an accomplice of women, our bedside filmmaker.”
Published in the Globe and Mail, 1999
