Letter from an Unknown Woman

Joan Fontaine and her husband William Dozier produced this film which contains a classic performance for Fontaine. In it she plays a woman who sees a lot more in the character of the man of her dreams than he really possesses. The object of her affection is Louis Jourdan, a womanizing concert pianist who when the film opens up is about to flee the scene rather than face an irate husband in a duel. Just as he's ready to take it on the lam, Jourdan receives a Letter From An Unknown Woman, one of many he's known in his life. He reads and the story in flashback begins.

Like in her performance in The Constant Nymph Joan starts her performance as a child. When and widowed mother Mady Christians were living in Vienna, Jourdan was learning his craft and the sound of his playing gave her romantic fantasies.

Later on when they meet as an adult they do have a brief affair which leaves her with child. True to his nature he leaves her and pursues his career and his romantic avocations. She was barely a blip on his radar.

During the course of Fontaine's off screen narration of her letter, the tragedy of her life unfolds and the causes are a combination of her romantic fantasies and his lack of character. I can't say more but the end is truly heartbreaking.

Letter From An Unknown Woman was a nice and truly original idea. It starts slowly, but you really get drawn into the story by Fontaine's off screen narration and on screen performance. Jourdan too is fascinating as a man who is less than the sum of his parts.

A really great choice of roles for Joan Fontaine.

Deeply moving story from one of cinema's great stylists, Max Ophuls (Le Ronde, Earrings of Madam De…, Lola Montes), stars Jane Fonatain as Lisa, a young woman hopelessly in love with dashing but callous piano player Stefan (Louis Jordan). Fontain played perhaps the best role of her career and was incredibly touching and convincing as a teenage girl (she was 31 when she took the part) that fell in love from the first sight and whose whole life was under the spell of this rare unrequited love that was recognized, alas, too late. One may ask how such a beautiful, sublime, and charming creature like Lisa would carry a torch through the years for a man who uses her without pity and does not remembers her name or her face – well, the mystery of love is unsolvable. King Solomon, one of the wisest men ever lived said once, "There are three things I can't explain, and one, I can't understand - the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a ship in the sea, the way of a snake crawling up the mountain, and the way of a man to the heart of a woman." I guess, nowadays we can explain the first three mysteries but never will be able to understand the fourth one... Max Ophuls' who had worked in many European countries and "gave camera movement its finest hours in the history of the cinema" made romantic and elegant "The Letter from an Unknown Woman" in Hollywood and it is regarded as his best American movie.

Over a period of years, a young woman is gripped by a romantic obsession with tragic results.

Despite the heavy romantic overlay, the movie strikes me as a one-of-a-kind noir. In fact, the production contains a number of noirish earmarks. Consider the foreboding nighttime atmosphere of so many scenes; also, the heavy sense of doom surrounding Lisa's obsession; then there's Stefan's seductive charm, a kind of spiderman in reverse. And while there's no crime in the legal sense, Stefan does commit a moral crime that leaves Lisa emotionally destitute. Nothing significant hangs on this classification, but it is a way of likening Lisa's predicament to noir's typically doomed characters and the dark universe they inhabit.

Noir or not, the movie bears the clear stamp of an artistic sensibility thanks to director Ophuls, along with expert art design, set design, and cinematography. It's these formal qualities that lift the material above conventional soap opera. And though the screenplay seems pretty implausible at times, the device of the letter and Stefan's response to it create a beautifully rounded morality tale. Of course, having a 30-year old Fontaine play a teenager in the opening scenes is a stretch; however, Ophuls manages to finesse, using long and medium shots instead of revealing close-ups. Despite the difficult challenge, Fontaine manages to bring off her evolving role in persuasive fashion.

All in all, the movie remains an exquisite combination of European sensibility and Hollywood professionalism. Together they produce an unforgettable visual and emotional experience that successfully challenges the condescending label of "a woman's picture".

This film grows even more extraordinary when compared with its source, Stefan Zweig's novella of the same name. In the story, Stefan is a writer, not a musician. The film transforms him into a pianist, thereby insuring that his seductive art can work on the audience at the same time as it works on the heroine. This movie gets bigger every time it is viewed. It seems to offer new surprises every time, because of the perfection of its structure and the implicative richness of its mise-en-scene. The echo effects ("Two weeks!") take on fresh meanings, and there is even a good deal of religious symbolism to be found.

An admirable scene sums up the whole movie:Stefan and Liza are aboard a "train" and they "travel".It's actually a fixed train,and some kind of stagehand forwards a chocolate box scenery :Venice ,Switzerland... In the real world ,trains are ominous messengers of death and despair:it's a train which takes Stefan away after their affair,a train which takes the young boy to his death.

Stefan (Jourdan)lives his selfish life without seeing anything.Ophuls(spelled Opuls in the cast and credits) shows him as a handsome nice young man,but if you look with care,you'll notice it's always Liza(Fontaine)who's looking at him with love.Jourdan seems to care but actually he knows so many women that he acts as if he's in a play:Liza's admiration means nothing to him who is a ladykiller-see the scene when Liza comes back from the station- and a celebrated musician adulated by the crowds.Liza is the romantic woman,with a zest of touch of Madame Bovary thrown in -it's not a coincidence if Minnelli chose Jourdan as Madame Bovary's lover in his eponymous movie the very same year-For her,there must be only one love ,and she's prepared to give it all.

Joan Fontaine had perhaps never been so good as here.Her whole life ,as she writes her letter (the movie is a flashback ) could have been written in the past conditional.Main influence is certainly that of John Stahl and his "only yesterday" (1933)in which Margaret Sullavan wrote John Boles such a letter.Even the young boy is present in both movies.The last page of the letter,ink-stained (or tear-stained?)takes the audience to a peak of emotion.The final predates the ending of Ophuls's "Madame de" (1953),and the scene on the "train" ,an imitation of life ,the big circus of "Lola Montes" (1955)

This is probably Louis Jourdan's best part as well.A French actor,he was never that much popular in his native country ,and he found his best parts in the US ,be it artistically (Ophuls ,Hitchcock and Minnelli) or commercially (Octopussy) speaking.