Letter from an Unknown Woman ***** (1948, Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan, Mady Christians) – Classic Movie Review 5247

Director Max Ophüls’s gloriously romantic 1948 movie provides a memorable walk on the wild side of romance here as Joan Fontaine’s character Lisa Berndle is overwhelmed by unrequited love for dashing but self-obsessed womanising pianist Stefan Brand (played by Louis Jourdan).

Fontaine’s Lisa is loved momentarily by him, and then completely forgotten. She has his child and marries someone else, but is finally brought out of her misery years later when she meets Jourdan’s Stefan again.

Ophüls delivers a beautifully realised, achingly performed post-war re-creation of a Vienna of long ago, conjuring up doom-laden images amid thick snow, the music of Strauss and bittersweet love.

Whole clutches of handkerchiefs are essential to wipe away the tears for this masterful evocation of time past and the pangs of passion, gorgeously photographed in black and white by Franz Planer, sumptuously set in the production designs of Alexander Golitzen, and elegantly handled by Ophüls. It is a huge credit to Howard Koch’s painstaking adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novel Brief Einer Unbekannten and to its tasteful producer, John Houseman.

Also in the cast are Mady Christians as Frau Berndle, Art Smith, Marcel Journet, Art Smith. Carol Yorke, Howard Freeman, John Good, Leo B Pessin, Erskine Sanford, Otto Waldis, Sonja Bryden, Betty Blythe, Jack Gargan, Lisa Golm, Paul E Burns, Ramsay Hill, Ilsa Gruning, Celia Lovsky, John McCallum, Torben Meyer, Norbert Schiller, Lester Sharpe, Vera Stokes, Roland Varno, Judith Wodbury, June Wood, Diane Lee Steward and William Trenk.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5247

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