Art Smith – Movie Musings

Lusciously filmed melodrama that might also be an exploration of dangerous obsession

Director: Max Ophüls

Cast: Joan Fontaine (Lisa Berndle), Louis Jourdan (Stefan Brand), Mady Christians (Frau Berndle), Marcel Journet (Johann Stauffer), Art Smith (John), Howard Freeman (Herr Kastner), Carol Yorke (Marie), John Good (Lt. Leopold von Kaltnegger)

Faded pianist and lothario Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan) plans to skip town in 1920s Vienna before his duel with a reputed crack-shot. He’s packed up and ready to go, but halts when his butler passes him a letter from a woman unknown to him that opens “By the time you read this letter, I may be dead”. The writer is Lisa Berndle (Joan Fontaine), a young woman who has loved Stefan since first seeing him when she was an impressionable 15-year-old living in his apartment block in 1900. All her life she has shadowed Stefan and twice they have met – once ten years before, spending a few romantic days together and then again recently under another name – but Stefan has no idea who she is.

Adapted from a Stefan Zweig short story, Letter From an Unknown Woman becomes a richly elaborate display of film-making from Max Ophüls, a show-case for his gorgeous camera work and luscious sense of visual theatre. This is classic melodrama, the characters thrown together after years apart by chance and contrivance, heightened emotions guiding every scene, with the suspense hook at all times of wondering who will see clearly first: will Stefan recognise this woman who has loved him from afar all his life, or will Lisa acknowledge that what she wants from Stefan, a full recognition and genuine return of her feelings, he is unable to give?

It makes for perfect material for Ophüls almost-unmatched visual sense. Letter From an Unknown Woman is packed with the sort of elaborate, carefully planned tracking shots and fluidic camera movements Ophüls made his own. From the start, the camera roves upwards, following the young Lisa as she excitedly runs up a spiral staircase to creep into the apartment of Stefan. There is a superbly handled tracking shot through the street of Venice, as a mid-twenties Lisa walks with a soldier would-be-suitor whose proposal she will immediately reject. And, most triumphantly of all, a tracking shot through a grand society theatre, that roams past crowds of hoi-polloi with Lisa, before focusing on her reaction as she glances Stefan from a distance across the hall.

It’s a visual richness Ophüls triumphs at and he uses it to give an intensity to several scenes, in particular the lost opportunity weekend Lisa spends with Stefan. This is marked by a beautifully framed late-night café dance, before a walk full of romantic lingering in a nearly-abandoned fairground. What’s superb about what Ophüls does with these sequences is to make them look romantic while also suggesting a sort of broken decadence to them (the locations, like the slightly faded café with its bored band, are always slightly past their best). There is a faded grandeur in Letter From an Unknown Woman, with everyone clinging to something they’ve lost or never had, hopes of love or artistic success that are never quite going to happen.

It’s easy to see Letter from an Unknown Woman as a traditional romance of the loyal loving woman, who sticks with her love for a man for better-or-worse. But, particularly today, it’s also clear that the film walks a fine line where its possible to see its lead character as both richly romantic and a delusional, obsessive border-line stalker, fixated on a heartless seducer. Is love a force to be praised at all times, or a destructive force that prevents someone from maturing? For all the richness of the photography and music, it’s hard not to think it’s the latter. And I think Ophüls lets this play on the edges, the camera lingering at points on Fontaine’s face full of obsessive self-sacrifice monomania.

It make for a richly complex role for Joan Fontaine, playing the young Lisa from age 15 to 35, taking her from doe-eyed, love-struck teenager to a woman seasoned by years of regrets, obsessively clinging to has last chance of finding a love she has spent her whole life pining for. Fontaine is giddy, excited but that glimmer of obsession is always there. Ophüls presents her at one point standing, stalker-like, outside Stefan’s apartment, her eyes craning up for just a glance of the object of her affection. In his presence, she’s breathless and excited but also with a touch of pain and desperation, longing for him to give her some sort of validation after years of dutiful, unremarked-on love. Fontaine manages to keep Lisa vulnerable and sympathetic, even as she goes about her life with an obsessive self-destruction, discarding other suitors, spending years working a menial role in a dress shop on the off-chance it might lead to an encounter with Stefan.

Self-destruction is what this ‘relationship’ brings to Lisa, a woman who stubbornly refuses to move on in her life from the decisions and emotions she first experiences as a teenager and will discard attentive lovers, husbands and even children all to the chance of finding a few moments of bliss with the object of her affection. She does this with a real sense of fragility, a longing that keeps her vulnerable, but also something that keeps her from really living her life. Particularly since Stefan – and the film uses Louis Jourdan’s cool, detached arrogance to great effect – emerges as a heartless roué, who thinks only of the immediate and destroys his own promise in a hedonistic clinging to the moment rather than really building something.

For all its luscious romance, Letter from an Unknown Woman carries this air of self-destructive futility about it. Is cradling a teenage obsession healthy for Lisa? Especially as its object is scarcely worthy of the effort? After all, Stefan meets and seduces (as he sees it) the same woman twice several years apart without ever joining the dots up in his head- repeating the same smooth pick-up lines both time. It doesn’t stop Lisa, until the very end, lighting up with a sort of youthful joy you imagine she’s not felt at any other time But Ophüls is using it to build towards a moment where Stefan may perhaps finally remember Lisa – and even more strikingly may realise the shallow emptiness of his whole life and the lost opportunity of being genuinely loved by someone.

That feeling exists, even if you feel (as I do) that Stefan is the unworthy figure of an emotionally-immature woman’s unhealthy obsession. Perhaps Lisa’s life would have been better and happier if she had moved on, as we all do, from our first crushes. But Letter from an Unknown Woman also celebrates a sort of strength in this, by contrasting the morally pure and consistent Lisa with the shallow and mercenary Stefan. His flaws are obvious but, in a way, they also serve to cement Lisa’s own innocence and vulnerability – and add to the impact as Stefan realises the path not taken.

Humphrey Bogart struggles with a dark capacity for rage In a Lonely Place

Director: Nicholas Ray

Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Dixon Steele), Gloria Grahame (Laurel Gray), Frank Lovejoy (Sergeant Brub Nicolai), Carl Benton Reid (Captain Lochner), Art Smith (Mel Lippman), Martha Stewart (Mildred Atkinson), Jeff Donnell (Sylvia Nicholai), Robert Warwick (Charlie Waterman)

Hollywood: it’s a dark town. When movie makers turn their lens on themselves you’ve just as likely to see the dark underside of showbusiness, as you have a celebration. In a Lonely Place was made in the same year as Sunset Boulevard, and it’s even darker and less hopeful than that movie. It focuses on a person with a certain level of kudos, that has led others to overlook his deep personal flaws. In a Lonely Place reveals itself as a quite ahead of its time in its unflinching look at why people find themselves drawn into potentially abusive, controlling relationships with people who talk endlessly about how much they love you even while they try and control every aspect of your life. Overlooked at the time, it’s seen more and more as a classic.

Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) is a successful screenwriter but has gone a few years since his list hit. Hired to adapt a plot-boiler he’s so contemptuous of the synopsis he invites a waitress at his favourite restaurant, Mildred (Martha Atkinson), to his flat one night to describe the story to him. Becoming as bored with her as he is with the cliched plot, he sends her home. When she is murdered later that night, Dixon is number 1 suspect. He’s alibied by his neighbour, aspiring actress Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) and the two start a relationship. But the pressure from the investigation and his writing assignments bring Dixon’s barely controlled rage more and more to the surface – with Laurel slowly fearing that he could be capable of anything if pushed to it.

It would be expected for a movie of this period – say something like Suspicion where of course Cary Grant is just misunderstood not a would-be killer – for all this to simmer and then resolve itself as a terrible series of errors (mostly of course from the woman). In a Lonely Place doesn’t do this. Instead, from the start we are given no reason to doubt Dixon’s capacity for near-murderous rage. Practically the first thing we see him do is assault a producer – albeit avenging an insult to an alcoholic actor friend. His first resort is violence. It’s something he’ll resort to time and time again, his capacity for anger joined with a self-pity that makes preemptive violence more likely.

It bleeds into the relationship with Laurel, which at first is all goodness and light. The two of them are well-suited, and an excellent tonic for each other: she’s a combination of muse and amanuensis, helping Dixon turn out his script; he opens doors in Hollywood she has spent years pushing against. But Dixon’s possessiveness, resentment and suspicion become clearer, accentuated by Laurel’s reserve and caution to emotional commitment. The relationship becomes tortured as Dixon resents any trace of suspicion against him, alternating with desperately possessive pleading for love. Any deviation from his idea of their relationship is seen by him as an act of betrayal.

Then there’s that temper. It’s there all the time, a sadistic streak that suggests a damaging lack of empathy. Dixon – while vaguely sorry for Martha’s death – is also perfectly happy discussing her demise with a clinical academic interest. He’s unphased by crime scene photos. He feels no guilt about not driving her home. Later, at the house of his friend (one of the detectives) he theorises how the crime was committed with an animation that turns into unsettling excitement. After a row with Laurel he drives a car (with both of them in it) with reckless fury and then nearly beats to death someone whose car he clips. Dixon follows these moments with futile half-apologies – anonymous flowers for Martha’s family, anonymous cheques to pay for car damages. But he never addresses his deep psychological problems.

This relationship becomes one ripe with the unspoken capacity for violence. Gloria Grahame is excellent as a careful, guarded woman who opens herself romantically, only to become terrified that the man in her life could just as easily kill her as kiss her. It’s a tension we feel too. Making breakfast, Dixon may talk about how they will be together always– but his vulnerable voice underlines his own doubts, and his furious insistence that they marry ASAP carries the capacity for fury if denied.

As Dixon, Humphrey Bogart gives one of (if not the) greatest performances of his career. Playing a character who, with his dark rages, allegedly had similarities with himself, his Dixon is a bleak figure. Capable of wit and charm, Bogart also makes him a cruel, seedy and sinister in his excitement at murder, while never preventing us finding him vulnerable and weak in his fear at being abandoned. But not sympathetic enough for us to worry he may end things by murdering Laurel. He’s never sympathetic – his late, motiveless, slapping around of his decent agent ends our chance of finding him that for good – but he’s understandable.

And he lives in a dysfunctional town. Where Hollywood intrudes on the action, Ray makes clear it is dark, unsettling, alien and unfriendly town – a truly lonely place. There are no confidantes or friends: only colleagues and potential rivals. You are only as good as your last credit: when your last few credits are poor, you’re no-one. On the other hand, rage and misbehaviour will be tolerated if you can produce the goods. It’s not a place for humanity or goodness.

Ray’s overlooked classic is a beautiful fusion of film noir and Hollywood insider movie. With superb performances from the two leads, it also feels way ahead of its time in looking at abusive relationships. Abusive partners don’t arrive twirling moustaches. They seem decent, loving and passionate – its only when you start to disappoint them they start to turn angry, controlling and abusive. By the time the film’s end come – and it’s a bleak one – you’ll be hard pressed to find some hope in it. But you will certainly find some great film-making.