Cinema
Letter from an Unknown Woman
Max Ophüls · 1948
Synopsis
Vienna, around 1900. Stefan Brand, a concert pianist, comes home in the night, determined to flee the duel he is due to fight at dawn. His mute valet, John, hands him the letter of a woman he does not remember, Lisa Berndle. In it she tells how at fourteen she lived in the building where he moved in and listened to him play at night; how her mother, remarried, took her to Linz, where at eighteen she refused a lieutenant's proposal; then how she returned to Vienna and spent with him an evening that he forgot, before seeing him again at the opera ten years later.
Context
It is the second of the four films its director made in America, after several years without filming. It is based on a short story by Stefan Zweig published in 1922, whose heroine is thirteen at the start of the narrative; Zweig had died in exile in Brazil in 1942. The story covers some fifteen years. One scene takes place in the false, motionless railway carriage of an attraction at the Prater, Vienna's great fairground.
Who it is for
A film of about eighty-seven minutes, in black and white, shown in France in the original version with subtitles.
Prizes and reception
Added to the National Film Registry in 1992, and included in 2022 in the critics' poll of Sight and Sound.
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