Letter from an Unknown Woman

+ intro by Geoff Andrew, Programmer-at-Large

Ophuls’ poignant account of a woman’s lifelong love for – or obsession with – a callous concert pianist.

  • Director

    Max Ophuls

  • With

    Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan, Mady Christians, Art Smith

  • USA 1948. 87min

  • Digital

  • Certificate

    U

The finest of Ophuls’ Hollywood films, this adaptation of a novella by Stefan Zweig is a bitterly poignant account of a woman’s lifelong love for – or obsession with? – a callous concert pianist. Profoundly ambivalent about who’s using who and why, the film is both a nostalgic recreation of old Vienna and a mordantly ironic demonstration of the constraining values of Viennese society.

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