Le Plaisir (1952)

Le Plaisir was the second movie made by Max Ophüls after his return to France in the early 50s.

Max Ophüls had started his filmmaking career in Germany. He made a lot of films in France in the 30s. The next phase of his career took him to Hollywood. In 1950 he returned to France and made four final masterpieces, Madame de…, La Ronde, Lola Montès and Le Plaisir. They are among cinema’s greatest achievements.

It’s not difficult to see why he left Hollywood. He was not going to be able to make the wildly unconventional defiantly non-realistic movies he wanted to make in Hollywood. It’s not that Hollywood doesn’t have its own tradition of non-realist movies. The Busby Berkeley musicals, the Astaire-Rogers musicals, von Sternberg’s movies, all come to mind. But Ophüls had something quite different in mind - something much more European.

Ophüls steadfastly refused to film in colour until his final movie, Lola Montès. It’s easy to see why. Ophüls had a vision for cinema that could only work in black-and-white and in his 1950s movies he wanted to pursue that vision obsessively. In movies like La Ronde and Le Plaisir he created movies that made zero concessions to realism. These were uncompromisingly artificial movies but they were artificial in a cinematic rather than a stagey way. They are gorgeous movies. They have that particular glamour that can only be achieved in black-and-white.

In Le Plaisir (as La Ronde) we enter a slightly different world. It’s not quite a fairy tale world but it’s not the real world. It’s a world where charming amusing things can happen and the rules of everyday reality can be bent a little, or even ignored.

One of the other reasons Ophüls needed to lave Hollywood is that the movies he wanted to make were movies for grown-ups. Hollywood in the 50s was not ready for such movies.

Le Plaisir is a portmanteau film. It presents adaptations of three stories by Guy de Maupassant, all dealing in some manner with pleasure.

The first story, Le Masque, is very simple but with a slight off-kilter touch. The setting is an expensive, sophisticated and slightly naughty dance hall. An odd young man turns up. He is dressed as a dandy but he dances in a slightly clumsy manner and collapses. It is discovered that he is not a young man at all, but an old man. An old man determined not to renounce the pleasures of youth.

The second story, La Maison Tellier, takes place in a brothel. A very civilised well-run brothel. The madam, Madame Tellier, fusses over her girls like a mother hen. As becomes obvious when it closes for a day it is in fact the most vital social institution in the town. Without it there would be no social harmony.

It closes for a day so that the girls can attend the First Communion of Madame Tellier’s niece. For the girls it’s a holiday in the country. They have a lovely time in the sleepy little rural village but they’re happy to be back at work next day. They love working in the brothel.

You might think this story is going to contrast Sin and Innocence but the whores are as innocent and virtuous as the most innocent lass in the little rural village.

Le Modèle concerns an artist who discovers a new model. She inspires him. His career takes off. They fall in love. But the love affair does not prosper. There’s an interesting twist at the end.

Another reason Ophüls had to make these movies in France is that they have no single strong straightforward linear narrative. La Ronde has a circular narrative. The three stories in Le Plaisir are almost plotless. They evoke mood, they display the director’s mastery of gorgeous cinematic style, they offer some witty observations on life, love and pleasure.

There’s a bitter-sweet tone to all three stories. They don’t exactly have happy endings but they don’t have unhappy endings. Life goes. Like Ophüls’ camera, life just keeps moving. Ophüls isn’t cynical or moralistic. He is perhaps gently amused by human foibles. Even the old man in the first story isn’t seen as merely ridiculous or pathetic. He will keep pursuing pleasure until he finally drops dead. Perhaps that is not so very bad. Just as being a prostitute is not so very bad for the girls in the second story. Madame Tellier treats them with kindness and indulgence. Their customers are a good-natured lot. Perhaps one day they will decide to get married, but in the meantime they’re having a lot of fun.

Ophüls indulges himself in some of his favourite techiques. He loved shooting through windows and he loved tracking shots, and staircases and scenes that take place on two levels - that begin upstairs and then move downstairs. It’s a stunning virtuoso display.

An odd but entrancing movie. Highly recommended.

I've also reviewed Ophüls' La Ronde (1950) and Lola Montès (1955).

Lola Montès (1955)

Lola Montès was the final film of German-born director Max Ophüls. Or at least it was the last film he completed himself.

An immensely expensive and ambitious Franco-German co-production it failed at the box office and was heavily re-cut despite the objections of the director. The first serious attempt to restore the movie to reflect Max Ophüls’ intentions was in 1968. A second more ambitious attempt was made in 2008. That’s the version released by Criterion on DVD and Blu-Ray and that’s the version reviewed here.

It is of course the story of Lola Montez, perhaps the most notorious woman of the 19th century. Actress, dancer, courtesan, mistress of kings and geniuses. Her real-life story was extraordinary but the story of the making of this movie was pretty extraordinary as well.

Ophüls was not the first choice of the producers. They apparently had Jacques Tourneur in mind. They had grandiose plans. The film would be an international co-production and would be shot simultaneously in French, German and English. They obviously needed a multi-lingual director. Ophüls qualified on that count and the fact that he had made movies in so many different countries made him an even more attractive choice.

Ophüls wasn’t interested but he become interested when he started reading up on Lola Montez. But the producers wanted the movie shot in colour. Ophüls had never worked in colour and was appalled by the prospect. They also wanted it shot in Cinemascope, which also appalled the director.

The producers then did one of those things that seem like good ideas at the time. They told the director not to stress about money. He could spend as much as he liked. Bad idea. Ophüls spent a breathtaking amount of money. The movie went way over schedule.

The movie was a disaster at the box office. It’s not hard to see why when you watch the movie as Ophüls originally made it. It’s wildly unconventional. The sort of movie that bewilders mainstream audiences, and attracts negative reviews from mainstream critics. This is an experimental avant-garde art film made on a blockbuster budget. It’s the kind of outrageous movie that would later be associated with Ken Russell or David Lynch. Ophüls throws the whole idea of a linear narrative out the window.

There are extended flashbacks but without any narrative coherence. It’s all very stream-of-consciousness. There are few concessions to realism. The circus sequences, which are the heart and soul of the movie, are pure fantasy concoctions having zero connection to any event in Montez’s life. It’s actually very Ken Russell.

The movie starts with Lola in a circus. She has become a kind of freak show, displayed as if she were a wild beast, a man-eating tigress. She provides entertainment for the crowd by answering questions about her scandalous life. These trigger the flashbacks but they’re not in any kind of chronological order. She also does a trapeze act!

We see snippets of Lola’s youth, of her first marriage, her affair with the composer Liszt and her celebrated and notorious affair with King Ludwig I of Bavaria.

The big issue for a lot of people is the performance of Martine Carol as Lola. Ophüls didn’t want her. I don’t blame him. She does her best and she’s really by no means bad but she just does not have the charisma and the glamour that was needed. She also does not have the erotic allure. Lola was a woman who made her living from her sexual allure. A king ruined himself and his kingdom for her. Martine Carol just does not succeed in convincing us that this is a woman for whom rich powerful men would sacrifice everything.

Peter Ustinov (an actor I’ve always disliked) is superb as the ringmaster. He’s not just the ringmaster of the circus. He has become the ringmaster of Lola’s life. He is no mere exploiter. He loves Lola. He is devoted to her. I have to admit that Ustinov nails this tricky part extremely well.

Anton Walbrook (a bit of a favourite with Ophüls) is excellent as King Ludwig.

If you’re expecting a conventional movie you’re likely to be baffled and alienated. But it is as I said earlier rather like the movies of crazed visionaries like Ken Russell and David Lynch (with perhaps a slight dash of Josef von Sternberg’s obsessive pursuit of style). You just have to go with it. If you do that then it’s an intoxicating experience filled with wild visual splendours. The shot compositions are dazzling. The colours are stunning. The sets are magnificent. Ophüls couldn’t find a circus big enough to encompass his vision so he built one.

Lola Montès is what you get when you give a crazed genius a blank cheque. It’s a strange flawed masterpiece. Very highly recommended.

After leaving Hollywood and settling in France Ophüls only made four movies but they were certainly memorable. I’ve also reviewed La Ronde (1950) which is in its own way equally unconventional in its rejection of conventional narrative.

La Ronde (1950)

La Ronde (1950), directed by Max Ophüls, was based on the 1897 play Reigen by Arthur Schnitzler. The play provoked outrage and was banned at one stage.

The movie follows the structure of the play. It is a round dance, although the movie also employs a carousel as a metaphor. It begins with a sexual encounter between a soldier and prostitute. The prostitute them moves on to another encounter with another man. That man in turns moves on the the next partner in the dance. She will go from him to another liaison. And so the dance continues.

It is the dance of love, and also the dance of sex. All of the encounters involve both love and sex, in varying amounts.

Each encounter is just a brief vignette but enough to tell us just how much each partner’s heart is engaged. Even when love is involved, it is still a game.

The structure could have made for a rather stagey film. It is theatrical, but also (thanks to the genius of Ophüls and his production designer) very very cinematic. It is deliberately and ostentatiously artificial. Anton Walbrook acts as a kind of master of ceremonies, leading us from one chapter to the next but he also plays multiple characters in the various chapters. And even when playing a character he breaks the fourth wall.

The setting is Vienna in 1900 but not for one second are we expected to believe that this is the real Vienna. This is the Vienna of Strauss waltzes and light opera, the Vienna of romance. The Vienna of the imagination.

Our attention is continually being drawn to the fact that this is not real life. Ophüls makes no concessions at all to realism. We are being told a delightful story but even if not a word of it is true we’re still going to be charmed by it.

This is a visually sumptuous, gorgeous movie. It was shot in black-and-white and could only have been shot in black-and-white. There’s a certain combination of glamour, style and artificiality that would never quite work in colour.


The difference between this movie, made in France in 1950, and Hollywood movies of the same period is staggering. There is a lot of sex in La Ronde. We don’t see it but we’re not left in the slightest doubt that every one of these encounters culminates in sex. No American studio would have dared even to contemplate making this movie. And it’s not just the amount of sex - it’s the movie’s cheerful immorality.

All of the characters are to some degree guilty of hypocrisy or deception but not one could be described as a villain or villainess. The philandering husband, the unfaithful wife, the professional whore and the part-time whore - they’re all basically decent sympathetic people. In a Hollywood movie the whore at least would have to be punished at the end but no-one gets punished here.

It’s a game, but the players know it’s a game. Nobody gets seduced unless they want to get seduced.

It’s a frivolous game, but the reason that the game of love and sex is so important is that it’s frivolous. Pleasure serves no purpose. That’s why it’s so important. That’s why we can’t live without it.

Ophüls has a dazzling cast with which to work. Simone Signoret, Simone Simon and Danielle Darrieux all stand out. Anton Walbrook was a major star at the time and he turns on the charm, with a twinkle in his eye.

Watching La Ronde is like drinking vintage champagne. If you want to see it as offering a commentary on sexual hypocrisy you can but my advice is to just enjoy its intoxicating pleasures. Very highly recommended.

The Bluebell Films Blu-Ray looks lovely. It’s in French with English subtitles.

The film was remade in 1964 by Roger Vadim as La Ronde (or Circle of Love). Critics love to sneer at Vadim. I don’t care. I like his movies and his version is worth seeing as well. While Ophüls offers us fin-de-siecle decadence Vadim goes for a feel of 60s decadence. I like both.

Arthur Schnitzler was also the author of the fascinating 1926 short novel Traumnovelle, the source for Stanley Kubrick’s movie Eyes Wide Shut.

Madame de... (1953)

German-born Max Ophüls had spent a decade in the United States, making a handful of masterpieces, before returning to France to make another handful of masterpieces including Madame de... (released in the US as The Earrings of Madame de... which is arguably a better title).

Earlier in his career he’d made movies in Germany and Italy as well. He seemed to be able to adapt to any film industry. His US movies, particularly The Reckless Moment and Caught, had a film noir flavour. When he returned to France he concentrated on costume dramas. But his central preoccupations remained unchanged - women and love, or more specifically women and their relationship to love.

Circularity was always a bit of an obsession for Ophüls, often as a visual device, but in this movie it’s the key to the plot. The unnamed Madame de has a pair of earrings that change hands a bewildering number of times, but always in a kind of circular motion.



The earrings were a wedding gift to the unnamed protagonist (played by Danielle Darrieux) from her husband. Her marriage has been a success of sorts. The General, her husband (Charles Boyer), is successful and respectable. He has affairs, but they are conducted with exquisite discretion. His wife has clearly had affairs as well, and until now we assume she has been similarly discreet.

Unfortunately she is rather extravagant in her lifestyle, and finds herself financially embarrassed. She will need to sell something, and decides that the earrings her husband gave her would be the least painful sacrifice. It’s not that she dislikes her husband particularly, but they are not teenagers and they are beyond silly romantic attachments to such trifles.



Madame de is however about to commit a major social faux pas. She is going to fall in love with one of her lovers. The Baron Donati (Vittorio de Sica) is a handsome Italian diplomat. Their affair starts the way all her romantic liaisons start. Her husband is not displeased. The baron is a gentleman and a man of the world and his discretion can be relied upon. The important thing is to avoid scandal and to avoid messy emotional entanglements, and both the General and the Baron understand the rules by which such sexual games are played.



As Madame de gets drawn further and further into a romance she had never intended, her earrings start to assume a strange importance. In their strange circular journey the have become associated with her love for the Baron Danati. They have perhaps become a symbol in her eyes for love itself. This obsession with both love and with these earrings will create a situation in which the General will feel he must act, with possibly fatal consequences, but for whom?

Madame de has always regarded love as a mere amusement, but now she finds that love is a passion that cannot be controlled. For someone as superficial as her this is a very disturbing discovery.



The plot is in some ways as superficial as the characters, but Ophüls’ genius transforms this very slight story into an oddly moving and engaging movie. And perhaps it only seems superficial because of our ingrained prejudices about the kinds of movies that are important. We’re inclined to dismiss movies that are about love as being of little consequence when compared to movies about gangsters, crime and politics. But really aren’t these things much less important than love? At one point the General remarks to his wife that their marriage is only superficially superficial and this observation could certainly be applied to this movie and to Ophüls’ films in general.

Danielle Darrieux gives a flawless performance as Madame de. Charles Boyer as her husband and Vittorio de Sica as her lover are equally good. Boyer in particular is superb. He has what is arguably the most difficult but also the most challenging role. All three characters in this romantic triangle start out believing they’re playing a charming but harmless game and all three will find out that love is far from harmless.



The Region 4 Director’s Suite DVD comes with one of the worst commentary tracks I’ve ever encountered. The fact that the guy responsible for it is both an academic and writes for an online journal called Rouge should of course immediately ring alarm bells that we’re about to be treated to a doctrinaire marxist feminist interpretation of the movie, and sure enough before very long he’s quoting Engels and assuring us that this is an example of pure marxist cinema. Absolute rubbish.

The good news is that the transfer is extremely good and the movie looks terrific. A great movie, highly recommended.