Max Ophüls
Max Ophüls (born May 6, 1902, Saarbrücken, Germany—died March 26, 1957, Hamburg, West Germany) was a German motion-picture director whose mastery of fluid camera movement gave his films a characteristic lyrical flow. He was one of the first truly international directors, sensitive to national differences and to the human qualities common to all his characters.
Ophüls was an actor, stage director, and producer in Germany and Austria from 1921 to 1930. He was a veteran of some 200 plays by the time he began work in films in 1929. His first important films were Die verkaufte Braut (1932; The Bartered Bride), regarded as one of the best film adaptations of an opera, and Liebelei (1932; “Love Affair”), a bittersweet love story set in Vienna. Both films included several of Ophüls’s trademark elements: lavish settings fitted with ornate and glistening decor, elaborate camera movement, a strong female protagonist, the use of musical motifs, and mise-en-scènes composed in a unique parallel manner. After Leibelei, Ophüls, cognizant of the growing influence of the Nazis, left Germany and directed popular but undistinguished films in France, Russia, Italy, and the Netherlands until 1940. He became a French citizen in 1938 and moved to the United States in 1940 after again fleeing the Nazis.
Ophüls was unable to find work in America for several years until director Preston Sturges, who admired Ophüls’s work, recommended him to finish the Howard Hughes production Vendetta (filmed 1946, released 1949), which had gone through a series of directors. On the strength of this achievement, Ophüls secured directing assignments for four additional American films: The Exile (1947), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Caught (1949), and The Reckless Moment (1949). These films represented the strongest body of work he had produced to date, and they again employed his adroit camera work and feminist themes. Ophüls greatly admired the efficiency and craftsmanship of the Hollywood studio system, but he returned to France in 1949 when he sensed that system’s imminent demise.
In France, Ophüls ended his career with the four films considered to be his masterpieces: La Ronde (1950; Roundabout), Le Plasir (1952; House of Pleasure), Madame de… (1953; The Earrings of Madame De), and Lola Montès (1955; The Sins of Lola Montes). Despite a weak performance by Martine Carol in the title role, and despite the fact that a heavily edited version of the film is the most common, many critics cite Lola Montès as one of the greatest films of all time. The largely fictionalized account of the 19th-century royal paramour who was later reduced to working in a circus, the film features the grandest display of Ophüls’s garishly opulent camera work—highlighted by an amazing 360-degree pan around the central character—as well as the penultimate “Ophülsian woman,” described by critic Andrew Sarris as one who “triumphs over reality only through a supreme act of will.”
Largely dismissed during his time as a technically flashy auteur, Ophüls underwent serious critical reevaluation from the early 1970s. Prior to the advent of feminism, Ophüls’s thematic concerns were regarded as trivial in the male-dominated world of film scholarship. Since then, his films have been viewed as not only prophetic but also thoroughly contemporary. His camera work and use of lush decor, once derided as empty exercises in excess, have been regarded by revisionist critics as painstakingly intertwined with the state of mind of the central characters. His reputation continues to grow, and he is regarded as one of the masters of 20th-century cinema.