Criterion's Ophüls.

"Le Plaisir (1952) is not the best of the three Max Ophüls classics Criterion is releasing today," begins Dave Kehr in the New York Times: "that would be The Earrings of Madame de... (1953), one of the greatest films ever made, and one of the most written about." Just as an example, when it screened for two weeks at Film Forum in March 07, I gathered the rapturous reviews here.

"The titular jewels of The Earrings of Madame de... provide not just the axis around which the film's elegantly darkening roundelay turns, but also a telling stand-in for the essence of Max Ophüls's art - an object of glittering surfaces which, through an astounding accumulation of passion, comes to embody devastating depths of feeling," writes Fernando F Croce in Slant. As for Criterion's release, it's a "majestic package fit for the film that would make Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris swoon in unison."

Updated through 9/22.

DVD Beaver Gary W Tooze marvels at the bountiful extras: "What a package, what a film - strongly recommended!"

Again, Fernando F Croce: "The beauty and Mozartian sense of visual musicality of his work enhance rather than detract from Ophüls's toughness, for, beneath the velvety suavity, the director's worldview could be as bleak, savage even, as those of fellow Teutonic masters Von Stroheim, Lang, Wilder and Preminger." On Le Plaisir: "Often palmed off as a minor work sandwiched between the clarity of theme of La Ronde (which critic Robin Wood correctly tagged a 'thesis' work) and the fullness of expression of The Earrings of Madame de..., it's nothing short of brutal when it comes to depicting the human desperation of glittering surfaces."

And back to Dave Kehr: "The frenzied resistance to the passage of time dramatized in the opening sequence gradually modulates into the becalmed, mature acceptance of the concluding episode: the essential theme of this great artist, here expressed with devastating purity."

"No other director has so touchingly conveyed the exquisite social graces that arise from the pursuit of animal lust," adds Richard Brody in the New Yorker.

"The film is a masterpiece of subtleties and although I'm a bit shocked at Criterion's slightly lesser image quality - I doubt many purchasers' systems would identify it to an overly extensive degree," writes Gary W Tooze. "The flickering was a bit off-putting although perhaps this is the best that can be done digitally barring a more advanced restoration."

Now to Dan Callahan in Slant, who takes on La Ronde, "based on Arthur Schnitzler's cynical, sexual fin de siècle play.... Ophüls is never jaded, or cynical, as Schnitzler often is; he's a true romantic, and he covers a huge range of male and female types in La Ronde, from Fernand Gravey's formidable, hypocritical husband to Odette Joyeux's malleable gal, who cries,'Oh, that naughty champagne! The things it made me do!' after a lascivious private dinner." He regards Criterion's release as a "somewhat disappointing package of a truly lovely film."

La Ronde is "a tasty little pleasure," writes James S Rich at DVD Talk. "A social drama that lightly steps across class boundaries to look at the bedroom antics of a variety of characters, taking in both comic and tragic details at the same time. Max Ophüls's return to French cinema is a marvel of structure and design, its circular storytelling and creative eye breaking boundaries in entertaining, intriguing ways."

"I can't say I'm overwhelmed with the image quality but feel fully sated by the fantastic extra features which lean this toward being an essential DVD buoyed by the brilliance of the film," writes Gary W Tooze.

Updates, 9/18: Doug Cummings has seen the restored version of Opüls's Lola Montès that Rialto Pictures will be taking around the country starting in October - and approves.

"Letter From An Unknown Woman foregrounds the profound Romanticism that lurks behind Ophüls's wry social commentaries," writes Billy Stevenson.

Update, 9/19: "The fluid elegance of Ophüls's camera is so subtle, and so organic to the storytelling, that at times the apparatus seems to be attached directly to the viewer's psyche," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "Ophüls's mise-en-scène (a much-abused film theory term that, if it exists to describe anything at all, exists to describe his movies) is formally staggering, but never clever for clever's sake. His best films - and these three rank among them - function equally as master classes in the craft of cinema and as grand entertainments."

Update, 9/21: "I would love to see his American films come out next," writes Sean Axmaker at the Parallax View. "Ophüls is less wry and removed in films like The Reckless Moment and Caught, less continental and more aware of class. He's also less coy about their emotional lives, more willing to let the characters open up and let their feelings out, even if it's just in a private, privileged moment. He's also more open in his exploration of the barriers between the public and private, the social face and the vulnerable person underneath, and the characters are more grounded in lives we can relate to. The sensibility is still there, but pulled in interesting directions that make a revealing contrast to his elegant European films. I'm not saying better, but it's a sensibility I find more interesting and complex the more I look into them."

Billy Stevenson on The Reckless Moment: "This haunting film translates Ophüls's fascination with an incommensurable, Romantic moment into a fusion of noir and domestic melodrama and, more specifically, into Lucia Harper's (Joan Bennett) anticipation of her husband's return from a protracted business trip - indelibly provisional, or even hypothetical, given the extent to which their economic security is predicated on his continued absence."

Posted by dwhudson at September 16, 2008 6:20 AM