The recently deceased Oscar winner Joan Fontaine created one of her most successful and most praised roles in the great romantic melodrama directed by the famous Max Ophűls. The quality of her performance is next to the ones in Hitchcock’s masterpieces Rebecca and Suspicion.



Fontaine offers a suggestive portrayal of the 27-year-old Lisa Berndle, a girl suffering from typhoid fever. In the beginning of the film, while on her death bed, Lisa sends a final letter to the famous pianist Stefan Brand (Louis Jurdan). It begins with the words “By the time you read this letter, I will be dead”, and later Lisa reveals to Stefan that she has been in love with him since she was a teenager. Stefan receives the letter on the eve of a duel because of which he plans to leave town during the night. While he slowly reads Lisa’s confession, the story returns back to the time when she was 14 years old, and Stefan moved into the building where her father was the janitor. Lisa fell in love with Stefan at first sight. After her father died and her mother remarried, the whole family moved to Linz. When Lisa turned 18, her stepfather introduced her to Lieutenant Leopold von Kultnegger. According to her stepfather, the Lieutenant was an excellent potential husband, but the girl refused to marry him because of her love towards Stefan. During the following years the paths of Lisa and Stefan will continue to cross; from their one night stand a son will be born and Lisa will eventually marry the rich diplomat Johann Stauffer.

The adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s short story with the same title is Max Ophüls’ most successful Hollywood project. Before the Second World War, as a Jew in Germany, he first escaped to France and then to America. This is an impressively stylized, very suggestively directed and an emotional story about a “cursed love” of a romantic young girl from Vienna towards a refined but insecure pianist. It is a movie in which Ophüls perfectly, with the maximum of scruples and very pedantically approaches the prose of the poet, translator, novelist, dramatist, biographer, critic and travel writer Zweig. The writer who created under the influence of Vienna impressionism and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis is also preoccupied with the human psyche in the short story “Letter from an Unknown Woman”. His subtle characterizations are impressively intertwined with the dramatic and story tissue of the piece. Zweig’s writing, which is distinguished with stylistic perfection and freshness of approach to the universal theme of unreturned love, directed by Max Ophüls who, although uncredited, cooperated with the Oscar winner Howard Koch (Sergeant York, Casablanca) on the film’s screenplay, receives the attire of a luxurious Hollywood melodrama which also enchants the audience with its impressive cinematography by Franz Planer (Roman Holiday, The Big Country), excellent music by Daniele Amfitheatrof (Song of the South) and excellent performances by its actors. (Josip Grozdanić)