Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) - film review

Vienna, circa 1900.   Renowned concert pianist Stefan Brand is about to leave town to avoid having to fight a duel when he receives a mysterious letter from an unknown woman.  The writer reveals that she has long loved Stefan and proceeds to tell her story.  She was an adolescent when she first fell in love Stefan, then a tenant in rooms next to those occupied by herself and her mother.  When her mother left Vienna to marry a wealthy man, the young woman stayed behind so that she could tell Stefan of her love for him.  By chance, they finally met and, yielding to a strong mutual attraction, they embarked on a whirlwind romance.  But the young woman’s happiness was not to last.  Stefan did not return to her after a concert in Milan, did not know that she had borne him a son.   To support her child, the young woman had no option but to marry another man.  Ten empty years later, Stefan enters her life again, but does he even remember her...?

Arguably the highpoint of Max Ophüls’ short but highly successful career in Hollywood, Letter from an Unknown Woman represents the 1940s melodrama at its best and prefigures the other great films that Ophüls could go on to make in France in the 1950s, films such as
La Ronde (1950) and Madame de... (1953).  Ophüls’ penchant for graceful camera movement and atmospheric lighting serve the film better than any of his other American films and the result is the most exquisitely poignant and delicately composed adaptation that Stefan Zweig’s novella could have asked for.

Joan Fontaine is at her most beguiling as the lovelorn heroine whose life is wrecked by an unrequited love of the cruellest and most virulent kind.  The selfless devotion of Fontaine’s character is beautiful counter-pointed by the egoistical self-absorption of her amnesiac lover, admirably played by Louis Jourdan, a French import hoping to make it big in Hollywood after a lacklustre start to his career in France.  For once, Jourdan’s brooding presence serves him well and gives the film the dark, slightly cynical edge it needs to keep it from succumbing to the dreaded sin of mawkish sentimentality.  The tragic fate of the heroine hits the spectator with quite an emotional jolt, as it should, but even when we are invited to moisten our cheeks with tears the film performs the nimblest of pirouettes and ends on a spiritually uplifting note, consoling us with the thought that the heroine may not have loved in vain after all.  Ophüls’ next two American films - Caught (1949) and The Reckless Moment (1949) - would be far bleaker in both tone and subject, a brief but brilliant foray into film noir.

© James Travers 2011

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