I adore the past. It is so much more restful than the present. And so much more reliable than the future. ~ The narrator of La Ronde (1950)

Ain’t it the truth! And no one knew how to bring the real, remembered and imagined past to vivid, extravagant life on screen quite like Max Ophüls. In the course of a brief, peripatetic lifetime, the director Max Ophüls, born in 1902 in Alsace-Lorraine of Jewish descent, tried as best he could to outrace the overwhelming tide of history. He forged a career in the theatre and the movies, dodged the Nazis, and made his way out of Europe to Hollywood. There he almost starved for years while waiting for a job, but survived the studio system, producing a few gems in the process.

Of the Hollywood films, one was a bright entertainment, the unjustly neglected The Exile with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in 1947. Two were flawed but engaging attempts at film noirs, Caught (1949) with Robert Ryan,  and The Reckless Moment (1949) both starred James Mason at the start of his U.S. career. In the latter film Ophüls also evoked a fine performance as a desperate, respectable housewife from one of the most interesting actresses of the ’40s, Joan Bennett. The director also made one possible masterpiece, Letter from an Unknown Woman in 1948 with Joan Fontaine.

While waiting for his friend and then MGM producer John Houseman to find financing for a proposed biography of Edgar Degas that might have featured dancers Leslie Caron and Cyd Charisse, the director returned to postwar Europe. Ophüls took all his pent-up creativity, the polished techniques he’d absorbed and hoped to translate to the screen back to France, where the film industry was struggling to be reborn. There, on a shoestring budget not evident on the screen, he adapted the controversial, sexually frank play Reigen,  by the early 20th century Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler.

“We are in Vienna, in 1900.” From the first scene of this movie,  La Ronde (1950), which airs on TCM at 2:45 am on 1/23,  takes us to the allegedly restful past to see what “has always been in front of us”–our unquenchable desire to see and to know, even if we might not understand or like everything  we learn there. It is a beautiful  looking lost world, photographed in  glistening black and white by Christian Matras with such signature Ophüls touches as long tracking shots showing the actors moving through intricate period architecture in the foreground. Despite the intricate wrapping,  La Ronde has, at its core, something to say about the ephemeral nature of love, the transitory nature of our time-bound, mortal lives, and the few moments of real affection that can brighten this often confusing experience. Ophüls chose to retain the setting in the distant past in a much more formal society than existed following the Second World War, but added several facetious nods to the stylized forms of movies within the story, and created a mysterious character played by the talented Viennese born actor Anton Walbrook (nee Adolf Wohlbrück in 1896) to act as tour guide to the past.

Ophüls has fun with his storytelling, assisted by a cast of many established and rising stars of French cinema, including Simone Simon, Serge Reggiani, Simone Signoret, Daniel Gelin, Jean-Louis Barrault, Gérard Philipe, Fernand Gravey, and Danielle Darrieux, (who at 91 is still making movies in France). His most commercially successful film, Ophüls detached yet coolly compassionate interest in many of his characters, especially the females struggling to find their way blindly through a patriarchal maze, might still entertain us almost sixty years on, even as it gives us some glimpses of our own enigmatic human foibles to ponder.

La Ronde (1950), while hailed critically on both sides of the Atlantic, was banned for a time in this country, since it was once believed to have “violated the standards of normal family life.” Seen now, in the sumptuously rendered new Criterion Collection DVD, it hardly seems shocking, but instead, appears to be a thoughtful cinematic confection examining the spread of the “germ of love” among ten shifting couples. While we would regard much of the sophisticated sexual byplay in this film as tame by today’s standards, at the time of this film’s release, it caused some controversy, and was even banned from theaters in parts of the United States.

Even more telling, when the Schnitzler play was first produced publicly around the time of World War One, riots broke out, and the author was tried on obscenity charges. Arthur Schnitzler, (at left), a doctor who was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, wrote his original play dealing deftly if rather frankly with then publicly taboo issues of the transmission of venereal disease, anti-semitism, sexual and class politics. He was acquitted, but he kept the play from being performed in his lifetime, as did his heirs–except for the French translation, which is one reason why this production was possible in 1950. In Ophüls‘ adaptation of the play to film, he did not directly address the implicit theme of the spread of STDs, though he kept the episodic structure of the original and the characters. While Schnitzler deliberately kept his characters sketchy, Ophüls seemed to regard them with some affection and warmth, as well as documenting their foolishness.

Our desire to see and know everything beneath the surface is personified by the gently magisterial yet gravely ironic presence of Anton Walbrook, (right, with Simone Simon), who plays our all seeing guide through the social and sexual maze of this pre-World War One society. Walbrook, whose sinister elegance cast its spell on audiences in The Red Shoes (1948), had proved that he could be a sympathetic, if doomed romantic with a continental flair in such films as Dangerous Moonlight (1941) and Powell and Pressburger’s sublime The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). As the Raconteur in La Ronde, he seems to be at his most playful and relaxed, leavening his patented world-weariness with a philosophical understanding. Breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to the camera in a manner reminiscent of Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant (1931),  Walbrook‘s character introduces himself in modern dress as our meneur-de-jeu, a co-conspirator and an occasional participant in the action as he changes into evening clothes of 1900. Superficially telling the episodic tale of ten shifting couples, with each half of one pair becoming a new partner with another in the next segment, the film deliberately reminds us repeatedly that we are watching a movie.

In a gliding, long tracking shot take that begins the film, Walbrook moves across a rather barren, gray sound stage, past a raised, 19th century stage with candle footlights, past modern film studio equipment, and later uses a movie clapboard to take us to another scene, and, in a particularly funny moment, appears suddenly as a censor who excises an imminent sex scene.

While a bit like a bemused Virgil to the viewer’s Dante in a trip through the underworld in The Divine Comedy, the narrator’s presence is never judgmental, but concentrated on observing and keeping the carousel going, like a director of a film. Singing and humming a waltz composed by Oscar Strauss that is initially catchy, (though it does become a bit grating too),  the raconteur finds nothing repellent in human behavior in this film that examines the difference between our ideal facades and the reality of a fantasy played out, especially when love and sex, in public and private are involved.

Walbrook‘s mysterious figure speaks directly to the most vulnerable female characters as himself, guiding their actions around the carousel that serves as a symbol of the roundelay of sexual encounters that each of them experiences. When interacting with the male characters, he appears in a  somewhat subservient part, invariably in some socially acceptable role as a fellow soldier, a knowledgeable neighbor, a maître d’, or a rather insolent servant.

In the first encounter, between a soldier (Serge Reggiani) and a prostitute (played by Simone Signoret, at the beginning of her stellar career), the narrator finds Signoret on the Merry-Go-Round. Dazed but obedient, like a marionette suddenly animated by the puppet master, she waits as instructed on a corner for a rough young soldier (Serge Reggiani, who would later partner again with Signoret in Jacques Becker’s classic Casque d’Or). A bit reluctantly, the soldier, who is late in returning to his barracks, finally accepts her bald invitation has sex with her under an arch along the Seine.

If this sounds crude as described, it is not, though the encounter between this first couple is certainly more realistic than depicted in Hollywood movies of the time. The discreet and highly entertaining film is entirely composed of ten different couplings, but the sex act is not the subject matter. It is both a celebration, a memory, and a critique of the artifice that surrounds it. Ophüls, who loved to overstuff his beautiful looking films with magnificent period detail, wonderful, intricate sets, and elaborately framed tracking shots that glorified the surface of his imagined and recreated worlds might be dismissed as too superficial. This critical obsession with the look of things might have made his movies seem empty, were it not for his ability to catch the smaller moments in life in his films.

The director accomplishes this here, since his great cast and creative crew use that veneer to highlight revealing the anxieties, private victories and disappointments that often accompany the rondelay of what passes for love. This is most successful in the performances of each female character in the first part of the film: Signoret‘s streetwalker, Simone Simon‘s lonely and compliant housemaid, and the lovely and perceptive Danielle Darrieux‘s married woman having an affair, (seen at the right, with the appropriate shadow of a bird in a gilded cage behind her).

In one segment of the film, we meet the soldier (Reggiani) pairing off with a servant girl (played with real sweetness by Simone Simon, who seems to be a much more at ease actress in her native French) on her day off  outside a dance. She willingly allows herself to be seduced, but longs for some modicum of attention and love as well, which is something Reggiani cannot give.

Eager to return to the dance, he is oblivious to Simon‘s desire for tenderness,  however unrealistic on her part. Left alone at an outside table with only a beer as cold company, Simon‘s housemaid is plucked by Walbrook from her momentary disappointment. Telling her not to fret about hurrying home to the wrath of her employer, and magically (or more accurately, cinematically) led through time to her next position several months later in the home of a young student (Daniel Gelin) where she is, in the customary fashion, his teacher and partner in the art of seduction, allowing him to reassert the role of his master to her servant almost as soon as their liaison has concluded. Has she gotten what she wanted or just learned to play along? We are never completely sure, though her satisfied expression and languor seems to indicate she has a gained a certain degree of self-assurance.

Danielle Darrieux‘s character of the nervous wife, is apparently trembling on the brink of going to bed with the now more confident Daniel Gelin in his bachelor apartment. She seems to have mixed feelings about the tryst, and arrives with not one, but two veils covering her face. As she explores the apartment and contemplates bolting when Gelin is out of the room, she comes across the carefully prepared bedroom he has arranged for them. This touches her heart, and when he comes back into the living room, and looks around for her, we know that she has undressed and awaits him. Unfortunately, as we dissolve to a shot of Walbrook cranking the Carousel to make it whirl, it soon breaks down, with noise, billowing smoke, and a puzzled Narrator removing his coat, rolling up his sleeves and opening the mechanism door to investigate the trouble. Ophüls cuts back to a chagrined Gelin, staring off into space, morose after he obviously failed to perform in his first encounter with Darrieux. The remainder of the scene concerns her efforts to gently console and tease him out of his funk; which, as she reaches past him to see what time it is on his watch, is no longer necessary after their bodies touch.

After this point in the film, the characters gradually seem lose their spark of individuality, and the delicate narrative thread seems to grow thin. While I think that this loss of individuality and some charm may have been deliberate, to communicate the way that life can seem a blur of shifting alliances and exchanges without real underlying affection, it lessened my involvement in the arc of the episodic story. Odette Joyeux as a cute gold digger and Isa Miranda as a flamboyant actress seem much less real. The rather heartless Joyeux and Miranda become involved in later sequences with the cuckolded husband,  (Fernand Gravey, who, as the smug & money grubbing spouse is probably the most pompous character), and an aristocrat in the military (Gérard Philipe), whose self-delusions seem impenetrable, even by the considerable seductive skills of Miranda, who also has a cynical arrangement with a dramatic poet (Jean-Louis Barrault).

Though the men in this film are treated in a more cavalier, almost clinical fashion, whether soldier, student, husband, cuckold, philanderer, poet or count, their plight as stereotypes becomes increasingly evident. Trapped by their own delusions of their self-importance, their false fronts begin to seem touchingly threadbare too, especially by the last scene, when the common enlisted man from the first scenes passes the Count (Gérard Philipe) on the street following “the morning after”. The soldier gives his superior a listless salute, even if they’ve both been with the same woman. Formalities must be maintained, despite reality’s occasional intrusions.

In the final scene, we come full circle to find ourselves in a small furnished room, with the memorable  Signoret sleepily reassuring an impotent client that his lack of success is meaningless. Touched by her understanding, the client, (a pompous, aristocratic Lieutenant played by Gérard Philipe, seen above with Signoret), pauses just for a moment to tenderly caress the woman’s face. At this moment, Ophüls chose to feature the one closeup of the film, (most of which is in medium shots, with the director’s customary sumptuous decor featured prominently). Though the men in this film are treated in a more cavalier, almost clinical fashion, whether soldier, student, husband, cuckold, philanderer, poet or count, their plight as stereotypes becomes increasingly evident. Trapped by their own delusions of their self-importance, their false fronts seem touchingly threadbare too, especially by the last scene, when the common enlisted man from the first scenes passes the Count the morning after, giving his superior a listless salute, even if they’ve both been with the same woman. Formalities must be maintained.

The joy of seeing some pain beneath the frivolous surface in this film is helped enormously by the effervescent mood created by Ophüls and the warmth of all the fine actors in this movie, particularly Anton Walbrook, and Simone Signoret in the glimpses of her prostitute character who begins and ends the story. What lingers is not distaste, but an understanding sympathy tinged with melancholy for a way of life and a society caught up in endless pursuit of an often tangled, dubious goal of money, pleasure, power and self-esteem. Sounds rather modern, doesn’t it?

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I think I first fell for the blend of visual grace and underlying uncertainty of Max Ophüls movies when I saw two of the box office failures he made during his American stay. Regularly broadcast some years ago on tv,  The Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)  and the noirish The Reckless Moment (1949) started me on a decades long quest to see his other films, with some disappointments on the way. I’m still waiting for a good Region 1 DVD editions of many of his films.

Along the way in my Ophüls‘ explorations, I was a bit disappointed by the somewhat cold, stylized atmosphere of Lola Montes (1955) (seen in a very poor DVD transfer, but with a fine turn by Anton Walbrook as the lonely Bavarian King Ludwig I) and an equally foggy VHS of The Earrings of Madame de…(1953), even though I was most impressed with the acting and irony of the latter film. I was delighted last month when the Criterion Collection recently issued La Ronde (1950) along with Le Plaisir (1952) and The Earrings of Madame De…(1953). The La Ronde disc features an excellent, informative commentary by Ophüls scholar Susan White, and interviews with the director’s son, Marcel Ophüls, actor Daniel Gélin, and film scholar Alan Williams, who reveals that Ophüls‘ fondness for long takes may have been due to a form of dyslexia! A correspondence between the son of the playwright, Heinrich Schnitzler & Sir Laurence Olivier sheds some light on the controversy around the play’s original production as well.

One amusing insight is given by Daniel Gélin in his interview when he recounts a series of misinterpretations between Anton Walbrook and Marcel Ophüls. Walbrook, whose sometimes fey mannerisms may have given his characterization a greater depth and perspective in the film, had asked Ophüls to discreetly signal him on set when he went over the line by by clearing his throat. However, during several days of shooting and many attempts by the director to clear his throat without any acknowledgement from the Raconteur, Anton went up to him between setups and asked, “Have you a cold, Max? Would you like some lozenges?”