I’ve really put a lot of effort into loving the films of Max Ophuls. Allow me to briefly recap.
Years and years ago, I excitedly took the TTC down to Cinematheque Ontario, in downtown Toronto, to see “Letter from an Unknown Woman” (1948). Having read about it in my trusty Leonard Maltin Movie Video Guide, I expected something astonishing. Instead, I left the theatre astonished that the film was so ordinary.
Years later, I drove from one video store to another searching out copies of Ophuls’ “La Ronde” (1950), and “Le Plaisir” (1952). One day, I found them. Both of these films were/are considered classics – the top of the top. Take a wild guess how I felt after giving them a look.
More recently, I rented a copy of “Lola Montes” (1955). Again, this film was/is considered a masterpiece. It seemed that everything Ophuls directed was/is considered a masterpiece. Third time’s a charm? No. More like three strikes and you’re out.
That’s what I thought, anyway.
Then, a couple of months ago, I was flipping through Prime, looking for older movies, when I stumbled on a title that rang a very distant bell – “La Signora di tutti.” “Oh yeah,” I said to myself, “that’s an Ophuls’ film.”
Considering my track record with the films of the highly acclaimed German born director, you’d think I would’ve passed this title by. But, I like to give directors – especially those celebrated so often by film critics – a 3rd, 4th and sometimes 5th chance. All the while, I keep repeating to myself, “There must be something there or why else would so many people think so highly of him/her.”
So, I clicked on, “La Signora di tutti” and gave it a look – a fourth chance for a swing and a miss.
And, boy, wasn’t I amazed when I watched the ball sail right over the centerfield wall.
Based on a novel by Salvatore Gotta, “La Signora di tutti” concerns the troubled life of one Gabriella Murge/Doriot. Stunningly beautiful and irresistible to men and women alike, Gaby (Isa Miranda), through little fault of her own, becomes a kind of life raft for the people who come in contact with her – one that, sadly, can’t support the weight of all those who climb aboard.
Right from the very first shot, Ophuls is determined to show us how expressive this still very young art form can be. He opens on a close up of a record going round and round as the voice of Gaby belts out a sad tune. The camera pans up and moves forward into a medium shot of a film company president, seated behind a large desk, forcefully puffing away on a cigar – the smoke, of which, might as well be steam coming from the top of his head. You see, he’s currently involved in a heated negotiation with Gaby’s agent for the right to make her next two movies.
It’s telling that the first “appearance” Gaby makes in LSDT is through the groves of a vinyl record. “She’s a product,” Ophuls is saying and she’s caught in the middle of two men who view her exactly as such.
From there, we go to a studio, where the director and crew of Gaby’s current film search frantically for their star. The camera rapidly dollies backward as one crew member hands off the search to another crew member, like handing off a baton in a relay race, as each of them covers every corner of the studio desperately searching for their missing star.
Then, it’s to her hotel. Her agent walks up the hallway to her door. He knocks on it. Finding it open, he makes his way in. The camera follows him from the side, moving to the right as he goes from room to room. Here, Ophuls elects to echo the crew members search for her at the studio by moving his camera ‘through the walls’ to suggest that everywhere Gaby goes is a kind of set. Making his way to the bathroom, Gaby’s agent is horrified to find her lifeless body sprawled across the floor.
Next thing we know, Gaby is lying flat and unconscious on an operating table as a menacing hood slowly descends from the ceiling to cover her face and administer the anesthetic. Surgeons now hold Gaby’s fate in their hands. The race to save her life is on.
What makes LSDT so exciting is not only the way Ophuls’ camera is always moving, always searching for a way to make style indistinguishable from substance, but the way he transitions from scene to scene. Dispensing with the predictable rhythms of film cutting, Ophuls uses dissolves and, in one stunning sequence, a shock cut to emphasize the fact that the bulk of the movie is being filtered through the disjointed dream state of a protagonist lying unconscious on an operating table.
Transitions from scene to scene and within the scenes themselves are designed to emphasize the turbulent emotions of the moment. Ophuls often cuts right to the heart of the drama. There is little time wasted. There is a charging, forward momentum to the film that suggests an out of control vehicle racing down a hill, its brakes now useless, as it chases one fleeting moment of passion after another.
In that way, this visual and emotional momentum very much resembles Gaby’s own turbulent inner state. It’s as if she’s that vehicle and that she’s helpless to stop from racing herself right over that cliff that no doubt awaits her.
While under, Gaby revisits her time at school, her time with her family, her first love and the tragedy that followed from it.
In two similar and crucial early scenes, Ophuls makes the same striking choice. The scenes involve sexist and tyrannical older men – one runs the school she attends and the other is her father – condemning her for seducing a male teacher. Ophuls choice is simple – he keeps his camera on Gaby for the entirety of both scenes.
In the first, she stands helpless, in the office of the school director, as he rebukes her for ruining a good man’s life. It doesn’t seem to matter that Gaby had barely even spoken to him and that his obsession with her was kept mostly private and practiced at a distance. The school director still accuses her of malice. As he shouts at Gaby, she just stands there. Though attired as an adult woman, in a fetching polka dot dress, the expression on her face and body language suggest that of a child. She’s a child, in this case, who is wholly unaware of the spell her beauty casts on the men around her. She is condemned for the act of being irresistibly beautiful. Talk of the responsibility of those very same men for their own actions is noticeably absent.
In the second scene, Gaby and family are having dinner. They have all just found out that she’s been kicked out of school. The mood is tense – no one says a word. Then, Gaby’s father sternly asks his wife and his other daughter to come with him into another room. There, he shouts out his frustration with Gaby. His voice thunders through the walls. Though in another room, Gaby easily hears her father’s intense rage of anger.
During this entire explosive rant, Ophuls, again, keeps his camera on Gaby. She clears some plates from the table and takes them to the kitchen. Ophuls keeps his camera on sticks, in the dining room, as it points out, through a door, into another large room where the family dog is tied up. Gaby walks by the dog, to the kitchen, to set down the dishes, then comes back to kneel down and pet her dog. She then returns to the dining room.
By choosing to keep the camera on Gaby, through both scenes, our sympathy stays with her. The two shouting men come off as faceless tyrants whose ranting and raving is totally out of proportion to what they are ranting and raving about.
The second scene is especially touching. Gaby is calm. She kneels to pet her dog. This simple act, in the face of her father’s apocalyptic shouting fit, reminds us that, at heart, Gaby is a gentle soul. It also suggests that she is, in many ways, still a child – no matter what the men around her think.
Watching LSDT, you can see Ophuls making choices and the reasons he made those choices. You’re aware of a filmmaker very much thinking his way through each scene and using his fertile imagination to get the most from each moment.
Amazing moments abound in this film, but one stands above all the rest. Spoilers coming.
Sometime after Gaby is kicked out of school, and becomes a pariah in her own community, a wealthy and attractive man named Roberto Nanni (Friedrich Benfer) invites her and her sister to a party.
While at the party, Gaby sits all alone sadly watching a crowded dance floor full of couples swaying this way and that. Though she suspected that no man would want to dance with such a scandalous woman, the rejection still stings.
Then, just as she’s given up hope, the host of the festivities approaches Gaby and asks her to dance. Though she warns him about her reputation, he doesn’t care. Gaby accepts his generous offer and away they go.
Though not the moment I was talking about – I’ll get to that one soon, I promise – this scene is wonderfully played as well.
Ophuls’ graceful camera follows the couple as they dance their way from a tight shot, in a crowd of dancers, to a wider shot as they spin off into another room decorated with a forest of streamers.
At the end of the night, Roberto and Gaby seem to have fallen under one another’s spell and seem headed for a genuine romance. Unfortunately, in the morning, Roberto has to leave on a month-long trip. Despite his departure, it’s clear that the two plan on picking up where they left off once he returns.
Though Gaby intends to go home, Nanni’s ill mother, Alma (Tatyana Pavlova) asks her to stay on. With her son gone for months and her husband always away on “business”, she can no longer take being alone for so long. After clearing it with her father, Gaby agrees and soon the two become fast friends. Even women find Gaby irresistible and just the thing to enliven an otherwise dull and empty existence.
Not surprisingly, once Roberto’s father, Leonardo (Memo Benassi) shows up and gets an eye-full of the beautiful young thing keeping his invalid wife company, those “business trips” suddenly don’t seem so essential after all.
In another remarkable moment, Leonardo seduces Gaby outside, under the cover of darkness, while, inside, Alma frantically wheels herself from room to room in a desperate search for them.
With exuberant romantic music blaring from Alma’s bedside radio, tragedy strikes, as she attempts to walk down the stairs and, instead, tumbles to her death.
Now for the remarkable moment that I promised to get to in the first place.
After hearing of his mother’s death, a distraught Roberto hurries home. Following her burial, he has a heart-to-heart talk with his father. In that talk, he tells him that he intends to marry Gaby.
At this point, Roberto is still unaware of his father’s affair with her. So, naturally, he’s confused when his father, looking like he’s horrified by what his son has just told him, gets up and marches to the other side of the room. There’s a silence between them before Leonardo stops, and with his back to his son, offers a curt and commanding response, “No!”
From there, Ophuls immediately cuts to a speeding train – the noise of which becomes a sort of aural exclamation point to Leonardo’s “No.” The effect is jarring.
In another director’s hands, one might have seen a longer conversation between the two Nanni men. Maybe Leonardo would’ve owned up to his love for Gaby. Who knows, maybe that other scene would’ve ended in some sort of physical confrontation. If so, that would’ve been a shame.
Here, Ophuls’ decision to keep Leonardo’s response to one word emphasizes his desperate obsession for Gaby, as well as the absolute power he assumes he has over his son’s wishes. To Leonardo “No!” is the beginning and end of the discussion.
This firm “No!” from Leonardo is the third time, in LSDT, where an older, tyrannical father figure type has used his power to punish youth and innocence.
First the schoolmaster, then Gaby’s father and now Roberto’s father all share a philosophy that values unchecked power – as long as they wield it. Their rule is not to be questioned. Their word is final. The fact that each has exercised their power in opposition to what would have been the fairer and more humane thing to do, in each situation is, for them, irrelevant – power is its own argument. Nothing further is required to explain or justify its use.
Cutting to the speeding train is startling. It becomes even more of a jolt once Ophuls dissolves inside to a tortured Leonardo and Gaby.
Though together, the sting of being rejected – not only by Roberto and Gaby’s family, but by the community as a whole – has left them vainly racing to escape the long arms of guilt that reach across vast distances to grab at them.
They’re like a couple of criminals on the run. Though they haven’t broken any laws, their actions have disturbed the unwritten laws of romantic love and familial loyalty. Doom is now their only friend.
LSDT is raw stuff. It bathes itself in oceans of emotional pain. In its world of pain and suffering, peace and contentment are always just out of reach.
A ravishing, walking, talking manifestation of salvation to seemingly everyone who lays eyes on her, Gaby, ironically, is unable to locate even a drop of it for herself.
Tragic, stunningly acted, directed and edited, LSDT finally showed me why Ophuls was and continues to be such a celebrated filmmaker.
