SOURCE: "Madame de: A Musical Passage," in Favorite Movies: Critic's Choice, edited by Philip Nobile, Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1973, pp. 133-45.

In the following essay, Haskell places Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman in a league of her favorite films, including Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Preston Sturges 's Hail the Conquering Hero, Ingmar Bergman's Persona, and Francois Truffaut's Jules et Jim.

Everyone Agrees, and a good deal of criticism is based on the fact, that our response to film is intensely personal and mysteriously chemical. Despite their growing academic respectability, movies still have the power to start violent arguments, to turn mild-mannered vegetarians into carnivorous beasts, to become the soapbox for every passing ideologue, to blight budding relationships and dissolve secure ones. A reviewer's love of a film is subject to all the vagaries of love—or friendship—between two human beings, and while loyalty and a certain steadfastness...