Heart-Shaped World: “The Earrings of Madame de…”
The Earrings of Madame de… has been called one of the perfect pictures of cinema. And it is amazing, a piece that is not just directed, not just choreographed, but sculpted in time and space, with...
View ArticleCarousels, Circuses And Cathedrals: The Film Art of Max Ophuls
[Originally written in November, 2002 for the "Luminous Psyche" film series "The Films of Max Ophuls"] “But where would people like us get to if we couldn’t get carried away?” –Max Ophuls When Max...
View ArticleThe Reckless Moment: Max Ophuls’ Masterpiece of Middle Class America
The thirty-second year of the Seattle Art Museum’s annual Film Noir Cycle, “the granddaddy of the world’s film noir festivals,” opens with one of the most unheralded masterpieces of shadowy American...
View ArticleHouses, Phones and Cars: Domestic Spaces in Max Ophuls’“The Reckless Moment”
By Norman Hale [Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] Max Ophuls, the great European film director, once observed in conversation with a friend that different love relationships...
View ArticleMax Ophuls in Hollywood on Turner Classic Movies
On Monday, January 23, Turner Classic Movies is showing all four films made by Max Ophuls, the great German director, during his brief tenure in America (when he dropped the “h” and signed his films...
View ArticleBlu-ray: ‘The Earrings of Madame de…’
The European films of Max Ophuls are elaborate dances of romance and seduction in a world of social constraints and fickle lovers, and his 1953 The Earrings of Madame de…, considered by some critics...
View ArticleBlu-ray: ‘Caught’
The American films of German-born filmmaker Max Ophuls have never been as celebrated as his more overtly stylized and seductively romantic French films. That attitude is fed by a sense of ill-treatment...
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