SOURCE: "Maupassant and Ophuls: The 'Real' and the 'Ideal' in 'La Maison Tellier' (Le Plaisir)," in Michigan Academician, Vol. XIV, No. 1, Summer, 1981, pp. 63-9.

In the following essay, Meilgaard and Burdick examine Ophuls's cinematic adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's "Le Maison Teller" for his Le Plaisir.

In his monograph on Guy de Maupassant, Henry James observes that "his vision of the world is for the most part a vision of ugliness . . . a certain absence of love, a sort of bird's-eye view of contempt."¹ This widely accepted view of Maupassant's work conceivably presented a challenge for the filmmaker Max Ophuls, whose main concerns were always nascent spirituality and growth as opposed to the primordial instincts of Maupassant's characters.

After having tempered the socially searing ironies of Arthur Schnitzler in Liebelei (1932) and La Ronde (1950), having introduced an element of male conscience and honor to the bitter dryness of Stefan Zweig...