SOURCE: "Reading Ophüls reading Schnitzler: Liebelei (1933)," in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women's Film, edited by Christine Gledhill, BFI Publishing, 1987, pp. 73-85.

In the following essay, originally published in 1986, Williams examines Ophuls's cinematic adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Liebelei.

The work of Arthur Schnitzler was important to Max Ophüls, both as vehicle and as cultural reference point. In interviews and writings, Ophüls referred to Schnitzler frequently, comparing and contrasting the Austrian writer's work and attitudes with his own. Ophüls adapted a Schnitzler text as his last project in pre-Nazi Germany (Liebelei, 1933) and another as his first project on his return to Europe after World War II (La Ronde, 1950). But both these events are more the result of happenstance than of conscious design. Out of all the unrealized projects that punctuate this director's professional history, two Schnitzler works were actually...