Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57950 in DVD
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: French
• Running time: 86 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
"By the time you read this letter, I may be dead," reads aging bon vivant Louis Jourdan from a letter found in his tiny hotel room. With tousled hair and a tux tired from yet another night of meaningless flirtation, he's startled by these opening lines and suspends his preparations to flee a duel in order to read the history of a love affair that he can't remember. For the rest of the film we're transported to the life of Joan Fontaine's awkward young Viennese woman, who has been hopelessly enthralled by the dashing pianist ever since adolescence. For a moment she was his lover, the emotional pinnacle of her life but for the philandering rogue simply another fling in a blur of women passing through his bedroom. This was Max Ophüls's first personal project in Hollywood, and he injects this exquisitely stylish romantic melodrama (based on a novel by Stefan Zweig) with his continental sensibility. Both lush and restrained, the endlessly moving camera tracks, cranes, and circles around the characters while maintaining a measured distance. Fontaine delivers one of the best performances of her career, vulnerable and yearning without lapsing into sentimentality--and ultimately showing a hidden strength as she risks all for one more moment with the love of her life. Jourdan is genial and callow, an empty figure faced with the meaningless of his life and shamed with self-discovery. It's a sensibility more European than American, right down the empty gesture that concludes this sad melodrama. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Masterpiece not always recognized
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN remains one of those cinematic masterpieces that has never gotten its rightful due. In Europe, it has been listed, in various cinema circles, as one of the 10 Best of Films. But, here, it has been unjustly ignored, perhaps due to its initial lukewarm public and even critical response. The superb Max Ophuls has directed a mood piece of substance, one that captures its milieu and time period with perfection. Joan Fontaine, who, at her best, was one of the best of American film actresses, here is remarkable, always capturing the changing character tones of a young woman growing into a lovesick woman. Louis Jourdan is impeccable as well.... the rogue, the handsome and dashing man who favors his romantic interludes over his composing acuumen. Everything is right in this film, and its black-and-white photography is expertly reproduced in the VHS version. Music and supporting players (including Mady Christians) add to the piece's effectiveness. It is a treasure of a film, a romantic work that eschews the pitfalls that make some moviegoers avoid love stories. Excellence is paramount.

The best romantic movie of all time
Not the usual tearjeaker of the fourties (see how far from, say, Mildred Pierce, this is). Not the usual women's picture. A deep study of "amour fou" in a very stylish, elegant high melodrama wisely directed by Max Ophuls. That Screen MASTER (with capitals) knew how to confer the film a tasteful sense of the turn-of-century romantic european atmosphere. But its assets are not only limited to screenplay and art direction. Two rather histrionically limited players (Fontaine and Jourdan, who else could be?) are fully potentiated to give their best of their usual screen image. All the traits of the Fontaine's charachter (shyness, demureness) are fully used in this hopeless (as all crazy loves) story of a woman who has her meaning of life in her love for a pianist who ignores her. She is poignant and strangely believable in her longlife obsession. The charms of Jourdan have never been better used than in that film (though he repeated it with much less success in Mme. Bovary). The third player -Vienna-, though just reproduced in stage, acquires a full dimension and integrates completely well into the movie. We can FEEL the city as we have never felt before. A sensible and truly romantic movie for all time.

A Piece of Art...
I must say that there have been few movies (dramas) which have emotioned me so much as this work of art by master director Max Ophüls (credited as Opuls here)...only films like "Portrait of Jennie" or "Dodsworth"...this was another one-of-a-kind experience for me.

I had read so much about it, that I had to SEE it...so I bought this VHS here, at Amazon.com marketplace sellers, where I've always made great transactions & had very good overall experiences, especially when it comes to obtain, these "out of stock/print", kind of elusive gems.

Joan Fontaine gives what one can easily be, the most wondrous, poetic, performance, she ever gave, including "Rebecca" and "Suspicion"...Here she simply is at her very best, close to perfection...just as Jennifer Jones, gave (IMHO) THE performance of her career in the aforementioned "Portrait of Jennie". She convicingly grows from an "innocent" adolescent who falls deeply in love with an artist (Louis Jourdan), looking him, following him, listening to him, "in hiding", "in the shadows", quietly, living her life only "for/because of him"... although he's unaware of that. This obsession of hers with this man, reaches to a point where nothing makes sense to her without him. It's platonic love & adoration, taken to extreme limits, almost to the boundaries of insanity, yet so disarmingly naive and true!

Louis Jourdan is equally effective, as the debonair, devil-make-care, playboy, man of the world, pianist, who realizes too late, what has been going on.

Wonderful art direction, sets, mood, atmosphere, cinematography, narration...excellent "raccontos/flashbacks"...great camera work, gowns, period detail...everything is so right...especially the truth in Lisa's (Fontaine) very deep love for this man, who becomes the only reason of her life, of her "breathing", of her "existence".

Max Ophüls really made a work of art, out of this movie...which by the way, I read somewhere, had a similar plot than the 1933 "Only Yesterday", which marked the debut in the american cinema, of that gorgeous actress, Margaret Sullavan; although Ophüls' film, is by far superior...'cos it "trascends" the "Tearjerker" status; it has an ethereal quality all of his own.

Not since watching "Shadowlands" in March of this year, I had felt & been so moved by a film. Really, ROMANTIC, unrequited love, at his best. And I tell you, I'm not an "easy" person...in other words, I do not "emote" easily, and at the film's conclussion, I have no shame in admitting that I cried like a baby. It reached my heart & soul.

This film ought to be restored and released on dvd format, since it is one of the landmark films of all time. Although I must say the Republic VHS Edition, is decent indeed.