The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (311 page)

Marcel Ophüls
, b. Frankfurt, Germany, 1927
1962: Munich episode from
L’Amour à Vingt Ans
. 1963:
Peaux de Bananes
. 1965:
Feu à Volonté
. 1967:
Münich
(d). 1969:
Le Chagrin et la Pitié/The Sorrow and the Pity
(d). 1972:
A Sense of Loss
(d). 1975:
The Memory of Justice
(d). 1980:
Kortner Geschichte
(d). 1988:
Hotel Terminus: Klaus Barbie, His Life and Times
(d). 1992:
November Days
(d). 1994:
Veillées d’Armes
(d).

The itinerant life Marcel Ophüls led as a child has surely affected the political and philosophical discrimination of most of his documentaries. Their chief target is nationalist confidence, and the crimes done in its name. Their obvious, but decent and hard-earned, message is for individual responsibility that will resist the surge of righteousness, especially when it calls itself manifest destiny. No personal ideological allegiance shows in Ophüls’s work. His pictures have the dogged tone and density of a lawyer’s self-examination. Stylistic flourishes and rhetorical ploys never occur to the dry conscience that produces them. Yet it is to Marcel’s credit that he reveres his father (Max) and aspires one day to make movies like
Madame de …
and
Lola Montès
. Father and son do not seem close as artists, but they both know how headstrong people can be and they both present the implacable touchstones of time, death, and the records. Marcel is the more honorable documentarist because of his commitment to observe impartially but with sympathy; he is not that far from the master of ceremonies’s helpless amusement in
La Ronde
.

Still, Marcel’s own comedies
—Peaux de Bananes
and
Feu à Volonté
—do not challenge the supremacy of his father’s art. The son’s wish to be lighter may only be the conscientious guarding against gravity. He says that his inquiries into some of the wounds of modern history were merely assignments. I think that is ingenuous when the pictures make such demands on audiences and have brought so many problems to their maker. Let Marcel follow his own path and admit a sense of duty; there are ample subjects along the way deserving his attention.

He went with his father to France in 1933, and then to America in 1941, as the survival of Jews became more threatened. And just as he commands several languages and understands many national insecurities, so Ophüls is happy in English and attracted to American culture. He attended Hollywood High School and he served from 1945 to 1947 in the Far East in the American army. He dropped out of the Sorbonne when it denied his proposed doctoral thesis—on the links between fashion and philosophy—and, in the seventies, a brief service at CBS ended when the network wanted him to make a conventional program on McCarthyism, rather than an essay entitled “Fred Astaire and the Protestant Work Ethic.”

As an adolescent, he appeared in Frank Capra’s
Prelude to War
(42), and in the fifties he was an assistant to John Huston, on
Moulin Rouge
(53), and to his father, on
Lola Montès
(55). He worked for a German TV station and came into movies on the tail end of the New Wave. His French features are not notable, and in 1967 he joined ORTF and made a thirty-two-hour documentary on the 1938 Munich crisis, using newsreel and interviews with participants. That has always been his method, with the aim of creating an intricate web of contrary or unresolved opinions that slowly turn into historical argument and pleas for rational, judicial compromise. The visual sense is neither strong nor cultivated: TV’s influence shows there. Time and again, one needs to listen to views and test statements rather than appreciate an exposed person. That may show a lack of flair, a prohibition of melodrama, or thorough investigative caution. It also pertains to the thought that it is safer to like people than to trust them—an implicit conclusion of Max’s films and a cautionary enough attitude for any filmmaker to dissolve boundaries of fact and fiction. It serves to make the length of Marcel’s films a considerable obstacle—proof of worthiness or necessary fullness? One conclusion from his best films is that the topics he has chosen demand book treatment, and that it is risky to give any hint in film’s decisiveness that a solution is possible.

The Sorrow and the Pity
deals with the German occupation of France, and the variety of moral reactions offered by the French;
A Sense of Loss
, with the Irish problem; and
The Memory of Justice
, with the practice and philosophy of war crimes and retribution. The first is far and away the best because it is so intriguing a picture of everyday hypocrisy and compromise—superb subjects for film, since the straight face cannot quite hide its duplicity.
A Sense of Loss
seems the least sure of all its historical facts, and much more vulnerable to the shrill pleading of its interested parties. To the extent that it is the most partial of his films, it is the weakest and the most open to challenge.
The Memory of Justice
is an elaborate, worthy essay that stumbles in the attempt to find a coherent pattern in different war crimes—chiefly, the German and the Japanese from 1939 to 1945, and the American in Vietnam. Earnestness easily seems didactic, and Ophüls is well aware of how readily film can distort ideas and load facts. He may be the victim of the size and intractability of the subject, and of the scant human ground it refers to. The local flavor of
The Sorrow and the Pity
is its greatest asset, just as the film is more touching because it does not leave an impossible question for the viewer to answer. The French film makes us realize how we might have behaved from day to day, but
The Memory of Justice
confronts us with so great a dilemma that it is easier to fall asleep. Film records surfaces and moments too avidly for it to be much help in forming the wisdom that can settle issues. You go along with film or bend to its suggestion; you do not assume the certainty of a judge.

Hotel Terminus
was better than anything that had gone before—rich, complex, humane, mysterious, and determinedly calm. It was also France, again, a country whose lies and truth Ophüls finds especially intriguing. In Ophüls’s documentaries, film has shown an ability to contribute to the large cause of history that leaves in question even the best fictional war films—as well as the daily grind of TV news.

His most recent film is a study of the journalistic process in Sarajevo and Yugoslavia, not as searching as his best work, but more filled with immediate pain.

Max Ophüls
(Max Oppenheimer) (1902–57), b. Sarrebruck, Germany
1930:
Dann Schon Lieber Lebertran
. 1931:
Die Verliebte Firma
. 1932:
Die Verkaufte Braut; Die Lachenden Erben; Liebelei
. 1933:
Une Histoire d’Amour
(a remake of
Liebelei
). 1934:
On a Volé un Homme; La Signora di Tutti
. 1935:
Divine
. 1936:
Valse Brillante de Chopin
(s);
Ave Maria de Schubert
(s);
Komedie om Geld; La Tendre Ennemie
. 1937:
Yoshiwara
. 1938:
Werther; Sans Lendemain
. 1940:
De Mayerling à Sarajevo; L’École des Femmes
(uncompleted). 1947:
The Exile
. 1948:
Letter From an Unknown Woman
. 1949:
Caught; The Reckless Moment
. 1950:
Vendetta
(Ophüls directed part of this film, as did Preston Sturges, Stuart Heisler, its producer Howard Hughes, and Mel Ferrer, to whom it was finally credited);
La Ronde
. 1952:
Le Plaisir
. 1953:
Madame de …
1955:
Lola Montès
.

In June 1960, in the third part of a season of French films, the London National Film Theatre showed the best version available of
Lola Montès
. The season itself, organized by Richard Roud, is one for which I will always be grateful. Above all, it had placed Renoir in his rightful eminence. But it had introduced me to several other major figures and, because it coincided with the incoming tide of the New Wave, it served to stress the abiding themes and vitality of French cinema. I was at film school then and I recognized Renoir as a cinematic ideal to which the young spectator or filmmaker could best aspire. Roud’s presence at the NFT also meant a reassessment of American cinema: that third part of the French season, for instance, was followed by an Orson Welles retrospective. But I had never seen a Max Ophüls film and, since
Lola Montès
came at the end of the season, I went to it a little dutifully, complacently full with new lessons learned.

In that mood, I might have missed the point of
Lola Montès
but for the company of a Belgian friend who insisted in advance on the extraordinary experience I was about to have, nudged me throughout the film to let me know that I was not dreaming, and—against the contented sighs that used to greet the end of any film in those days—badgered me into joining in applause, so fierce and isolated that it reawakened the curiosity of the audience. However, once they had satisfied themselves that it was not a fight breaking out, only two young men noisily clapping—and since, evidently, we could only be responding to the film—they smiled good-naturedly and shuffled out.

Too aware of the journey in appreciation I had already made, and of the way my response was being prompted, I doubt if I felt deeply about
Lola Montès
at the time. It took further viewings, of that and other films, to discover the justice of my reaction. To talk of Ophüls then was to meet ignorance or bland assertions that he was a frivolous, romantic director, concerned with decoration rather than content, a stylist for style’s sake, a chronic camera fidget.

Well, as Richard Roud and my Belgian friend knew then, and I know now, Max Ophüls is one of the greatest of film directors. He is frivolous only if it is frivolous to be obsessed by the gap between the ideal and the reality of love.

“Obsessed” is the crucial word. There are many authorities who describe Ophüls as adhering to “the cynical sentimentalism of an older Europe.” Penelope Houston wrote that in a passage that quoted approvingly from Peter Ustinov’s obituary on Ophüls: “like a watchmaker intent on making the smallest watch in the world and then, with a sudden flash of perversity, putting it up on a cathedral.” Ophüls might have smiled to read such withering inappropriateness from the man who played his alter ego in
Lola Montès
. Of course, the epitaph is affectionate and admiring, but it is condescending. What gives it away is the unwitting use of an image so close to Ophüls’s art, so uncannily reflective of his greatness.

The cinema offers very few easy careers, and Ophüls’s was insecure and peripatetic—characteristics of his films—and yet he pursued certain themes with undeterred ardor. First, consider the idea of circularity. Cinematically, that was embodied in full 360-degree pans or by breathtaking tracks round the circumference of some emotional arena. In
Lola Montès
, when Lola arrives in the circus ring to reenact scenes from her life, she is enthroned on a turntable. As it revolves in one direction so the camera tracks around her in the reverse direction: is that merely and frivolously beautiful? Or is it only beautiful because of the way it expresses the contrariness of her life in which past and present, hopes and reality, move in sight of one another, but never in unison?

Lola’s turntable is the last revolving machine in Ophüls’s work.
Le Plaisir
, taken from three Maupassant stories, includes
La Modèle
, a story about a painter in the habit of making mistresses of his models. But one girl is less easily discarded when the time comes for a replacement. Instead, she tries suicide, but succeeds only in crippling herself so that the softhearted exploiter is compelled to marry her. That wing of a triptych is worth recounting for it shows that women were not always victims in Ophüls’s work, just as men could seem lechers, lovers, or philosophers from moment to moment; indeed, he saw everyone as the victim of his or her own shifting emotions. And although the original story offers no basis for it, Ophüls has the painter painting the girl as a figure astride a horse on a carousel. The movement in Ophüls is enchanting but foreboding: the poignant manifestation of exhilaration that will fade.
La Ronde
, of course, is the mechanism of an entire film, the means by which human beings encounter transitory happiness as they demonstrate their own fickleness and mortality.

The fairground toy gives
La Ronde
a structure adored by Ophüls. It allows a consequential chain of meetings to come full circle: you may call that a piece of Viennese playfulness, but it is also a resigned viewing of the passing of the sperm. In
Madame de …
Ophüls uses a pair of earrings, working their way from person to person, to illuminate the small domestic tragedy.

It is the essence of such circularity, and of the carousel’s motion, that people stay in their posture, but that time changes, dramatically altering their circumstances. In many of his films, Ophüls takes in a great span of time, or makes a briefer period seem enormous, by the interchange of episodes, or the rhythm of flashback and present. In
Lola Montès
, the circus performance allows Lola to revive crucial fragments of her life. More than twenty years before, Isa Miranda’s actress had had the same structure of experience in
La Signora di Tutti. La Tendre Ennemie
is set at a party attended by ghosts, whose flashbacks endorse their present efforts to prevent a loveless marriage.
Liebelei
allows death to reflect back on life.
Caught
puts a felt love in conflict with notional romance.

It is principally in the sense of remembrance making up for unhappiness, or fixing tragedy forever, and of time advancing as exquisitely as his tracking camera that Ophüls is a tragic artist. If film is essentially the capacity to show a moment of drama or change as it happens, then Ophüls’s films are uniquely attuned to such transience. Changing time is the central consciousness, and the subtle ways in which it changes the subjective experience of what happened at any moment is his most poignant realization. Admit time’s ceaseless, calm advance, and you fall in love as a means to falling out of love—as Renoir quotes from Beaumarchais at the beginning of
La Règle du Jeu
, “Why has Cupid wings, if not to fly away again?” But this transitory creature, man, has consuming romantic passions. Far from cynical, Ophüls concedes that a sense of transience makes love seem no less affecting when it comes. The ability to rationalize one’s feelings leads to this self-deception. What better illustration than the bedroom scene in
La Ronde
between Daniel Gélin and Danielle Darrieux? Their assignation has faltered. Darrieux has come to him to become his mistress, but time is pressing. “What time is it?” she asks persistently, for she cannot stay long. But Gélin cannot deal with her either swiftly or slowly enough to stop that distracting question. They go to bed, but then he is briefly impotent. Her worry is replaced by tenderness (again the awareness of feminine power) and when she asks what time it is, that is a ruse to stretch her bare arm in front of him to his coat on a chair beside the bed. The arm restores his amorousness and the sequence ends in fulfillment as the camera observes the coat that contains his watch—one other roundabout.