LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (69)

Directed by: Max Ophuls (1948)

Starring: Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan, Mady Christians

The Pitch: A young girl falls madly in (unrequited) love with a famous concert pianist ; they have an affair but years later, when they meet again, he doesn't remember her.

Theo Sez: Old-fashioned even when it was released ("It belongs to another era, when women were [depicted as] gentle creatures, ruled by sentiment," scoffed Fortnight magazine in 1948 - just in case you thought the pre-feminist world was really as clueless as post-feminists like to suggest) : it's the archetypal slice of female masochism, a tale of a woman who lives for her man, loves him despite everything, subjugates her will to his, exists only to inspire his work and listen to his problems ("What about your problems?" he asks in a rare moment of gallantry ; "They're not important!" she replies). That the man in question proves unworthy of such devotion makes for a definitive tearjerker, and the finale - our heroine's posthumous vindication - is unforgettable, more unabashed pathos than anything since Little Nell froze to death still clutching her little box of matches. The rest of it is an atmospheric but curiously perfunctory movie, a long way from the usual tight plotting of Old Hollywood : its various sections don't really build in emotional intensity (they all feel the same), and details which promise to be significant - like the framing device of Jourdan waiting to fight a duel as he reads the titular letter - prove merely incidental. Yet it's one of those cases where more structure would probably have been damaging - certainly a neater narrative would merely have drawn attention to the wispy story. As it is the film is like a rather ordinary landscape seen at twilight, the "magic hour", suffused with a deep sadness which the landscape's ordinariness doesn't ruin but only makes even more melancholy : the drab, undefined narrative feeds into the mood of love wasted and chances lost. There's a lovely texture to it (not least because it's visually a lovely movie), drifting lives fed by dreams and destroyed by casual cruelties - it goes beyond its half-formed story to evoke a whole universe of sadness. Not perhaps the classic its reputation suggests, but - like all mood-pieces - almost certainly a film that'll stand up well to repeated viewings.