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Max Ophüls
Director / Screenwriter
1902 - 1957 
Born May 6, Saarbrücken, Germany
Key Production Countries: France, USA 
Key Genres: Drama, Melodrama, Romantic Drama, Period Film, Psychological Drama, Romance
Key Collaborators: Jean d'Eaubonne (Production Designer), Curt Alexander (Screenwriter), Christian Matras (Cinematographer),  Jean Galland (Character Player), Jacques Natanson (Screenwriter), Hans Wilhelm (Screenwriter), Danielle Darrieux (Leading Character Player), Fritz Planer (Cinematographer), Oscar Straus (Composer), Ralph Baum (Producer)

Highly Recommended: Liebelei (1932)*, La Signora di Tutti (1934), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)*, Caught (1949)#, The Reckless Moment (1949)*#, Madame de... (1953)*
Recommended: La Ronde (1950)*, Lola Montès (1955)*
Worth a Look: Le Roman de Werther (1938), Sans Lendemain (1939), The Exile (1947), Le Plaisir (1951)*
Approach with Caution: De Mayerling à Sarajevo (1940)
* Listed in TSPDT's 1,000 Greatest Films section; # Listed in TSPDT's 250 Quintessential Noir Films section.

 
 
 
Links: [ Amazon ] [ IMDB ] [ All-Movie Guide ] [ Film Reference ] [ Classic Film and Television Home Page ] [ Boston Phoenix Article (2000) ] [ Derek Malcolm's Century of Films ] [ Locarno Film Festival Biography ] [ Senses of Cinema Article (2002) ] [ Inside Out Film Article ] [ Baseline Biography ] [ Undercurrent Article (2006) ]
Books: [ Max Ophüls and the Cinema of Desire ] [ The Cinema of Max Ophüls ] [ Max Ophüls in the Hollywood Studios ] [ Souvenirs ]
 
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)Liebelei (1932)The Reckless Moment (1949)Earrings of Madame de... (1953)
 
     
  "The identification with a female consciousness and the female predicament is the supreme characteristic of the Ophülsian thematic; at the same time, the Ophüls style - the commitment to grace, beauty, sensitivity - amounts to a celebration of what our culture defines as "femininity," combined with the force of authority, the drive, the organizational (directorial) abilities construed as masculine. In short, the supreme achievement of Ophüls' work is its concrete and convincing embodiment of the collapsibility of our culture's barriers of sexual difference." - Robin Wood (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)  
     
  "Repeatedly, Ophüls explored the gulf between idealised love and the reality of passion: in Liebelei, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Caught and Madame De... disappointment and despair darken the mood, yet the films finally reaffirm love's undying appeal - reflecting, ironically, on the romantic illusions proffered by cinema itself." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)  
     
  "Max Ophüls is one of the greatest of film directors. He is frivolous only if it is frivolous to be obsessed by the gap between the ideal and the reality of love... No one had more sympathy for love than Ophüls, but no one knew so well how lovers remained unknown, strangers." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)  
     
  "A romantic with an eye for psychology, period detail, and sweeping camera movement who lensed melodramas about love and its joys and consequences." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)  
     
  "I was very influenced by the movies of Max Ophüls, who moved the camera all the time." - Vincente Minnelli  
     
  "The camera exists to create a new art and to show above all what cannot be seen elsewhere: neither in theater nor in life; otherwise, I'd have no need of it; doing photography doesn't interest me. That, I leave to the photographer." - Max Ophüls  
     
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"Max Ophuls had a romantic sensibility that is among the most astute in all cinema, while his flowing, generous camera style reinforces the poetic intensity of his films. Regularly dismissed as a mere stylist, his reputation has soared over the last 25 years and he is now regarded as a master of the doomed love story, able, like Douglas Sirk, to transcend the limitations of the stereotypic "women's film... Arguably, for his control of narrative space and for their affecting orchestration of romantic regret, Ophuls' 1950s films were his most consummate." - Richard Alexander, The Rough Guide to Film

 
 
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Pantheon Director
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See Also
Marcel Carné
Rene Clair
William Dieterle
Julien Duvivier
Sacha Guitry
Fritz Lang
Ernst Lubitsch
Vincente Minnelli
Jean Renoir
Luchino Visconti
Maurice Tourneur
Erich von Stroheim
 
 
 
         
         

 

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