SOURCE: "The Mastery of Movement: An Appreciation of Max Ophuls," in Film Comment, Vol. 5, No. 4, Winter, 1969, pp. 71-4.

In the following essay, Williams places Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman in a cinematic tradition that includes Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons and William Wyler's The Little Foxes.

When Letter from an Unknown Woman came out of Hollywood in 1948, it was publicised—accurately, and with that hint of big-studio condescension that obviously drew in far more patrons than it alienated—as "the simple, poignant kind of love-story that women like."¹ With Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan in the leading roles, the women did indeed like the film; it made a lot of money, and it was promptly forgotten. In The New York Times of April 29 that year, Bosley Crowther was probably right, on the whole, in saying resignedly: "All right, if all you are after is an hour and...