It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Preposterously plotted but stylishly directed and impeccably acted, this is vintage Golden Age Hollywood melodrama. So much of the story-line is improbable, as the young Joan Fontaine's poor young French teenager develops a lifetime crush on the debonair but rakish concert pianist Louis Jourdain, a fascination that has tragic consequences for both. Like another classic film from around the same time "Portrait Of Jennie" the mistake is made in initially having the female lead attempt to carry herself off as a much younger version of herself, but once she matures into adult-hood, Fontaine is effective as the quietly enigmatic woman forever drawn to Jourdain's debonair charms.I found it equally hard to believe that Jourdain's character could forget his previous encounters with Fontaine, especially the way that Max Ophuls directs the telling scenes, never mind that she eventually goes on to father his child. Such a plot could only end in death and tragedy and while I couldn't believe a word of it, still it was wonderfully entertaining along the way.The costumes and sets are excellent and Jourdain and Fontaine are to be commended too for their fine performances, but doyens of film-making will particularly enjoy the skill with which director Ophuls employs his camera-work, so fluidly at times that the action appears to float in front of the viewer's eyes.In a way, this film reminded me of grand opera, a wholly unbelievable story brought to life by the skill of its creator.

A pianist about to flee from a duel receives a letter from a woman he cannot remember, who may hold the key to his downfall.What a very strange film. Although the title suggests the film is about a letter from an unknown woman, we spend most of the time following a woman and her love for a pianist. Is she connected to this letter? Is she the one dying in the hospital? And how is any of that related to the duel? Perhaps most strange is that although the film follows the original story very closely (from what I understand), it changes in one key instance: there is no duel in the original story, nor is there a character such as Johann. No duel? That is the big event lurking in the background of this entire story!

Throughout the duration of Letter from an Unknown Woman I found myself scoffing at its characters and the situations they put themselves in, because 90% of the problems in this story are directly the fault of an impulsive, irrational action on the part of one of the main characters. By the time the film ended I was so fed up I had decided it was one of the most horrendous wastes of time I had ever subjected myself to and seemingly would walk away having learned nothing from it. But, after some reflection it began to occur to me that while I did in fact loathe the characters for their wanton displays of impulsivity and immaturity, this does not necessarily mean the film itself is to be loathed. The more I considered the film as a whole, the sum of these parts: characters, handling real-life situations, and the consequences of their actions- it became more clear that just because I found the characters to be "stupid" in a sense, doesn't make the film stupid. In fact, I found quite the opposite to be true- that the film actually serves as a tool to teach us about a certain kind of person or more generally, the moods and affections that can come upon anyone, in theory at least. It acts as a window allowing us a look into the psyche of an infatuated girl and a narcissistic young man, in addition to some of the people who get caught up in their strange affair. An original story, to some degree, prevented me from giving up on the film all together, but something seemed familiar about it and I had originally chalked up this feeling of familiarity to the fact that it was a silly romance film about a stupid girl who became obsessed and ruined her life for it. For example, she throws away a marriage to a young, well-off military officer and insults him and his father in the process because of her "love" for the musician, whom she does not even know in any real sense. To the viewer it is obvious that she is just a young girl infatuated with this brilliant musician, Stefan, a theme that has since been interpreted into various different stories, but she is convinced that what she feels for him is some exceptional thing that she will never be able to have with anyone else. Multiple scenes in this film were met with disdain on my part because of the context I was putting the film in, that context being modern romance films because I could pinpoint certain behaviors I felt were played out, tired, typical, lacking creativity, and just plain frivolous- putting literally everything aside in life just because of the supposed love one has for a person they do not even know. And the it finally occurred to me that while those things may very well be true, it is also true that at the time people may have experienced a similar relationship themselves or felt similar feelings, but this film is one of the first instances of a coherent in-depth look at such an unhealthy relationship and upon some insightful thought we can even begin to build a psychological profile for the main characters. New films may have since touched on similar things, but I realized I should not blame the film just because I found the characters actions and motivations misguided, that is precisely what makes Letter from an Unknown Woman still relevant today. The fact that I could so easily recognize what the characters were subjecting themselves to and why they did so speaks to the importance of the film because we all find ourselves in situations that we sometimes handle with emotion rather than reason and I became so angry with the characters because while the emotions are temporary, the consequences of actions cause change that can never be undone. Stefan takes responsibility for the events that transpired by the end of the film, but this was another point that infuriated me because he never asked for anything from the girl, he was a womanizer and thought she was just another girl, she developed an unhealthy obsession and now he is on his way to duel to the death over a woman he barely could remember and would not have if she had been mature enough to appreciate their romantic involvement for what it was instead of trying to force it to be something it was not and never could be in that time. It also serves to show us how far civilization has come since this time in regards to gender roles, for example, I believe that this story never would have actually happened if not for the gender roles perpetuated at the time. The girl sees her neighbor one day, hears him playing the piano, and falls "in love" with him henceforth devoting her every waking thought to him and developing an extremely unhealthy obsession. Woman at this time were expected to be good home makers and nothing more, as opposed to modern society where women are encouraged to perform in school or sports just as much as men are- so I believe if this girl had any concept of achieving something in her life or having control over what she truly wants and what she could do with her potential, she would never have become so hung up on this one gentleman. So, the most important lesson we can take from this film is that one should never let what another person is doing determine the course of your life and dictate what you do, while I maintain this girl was stupid to waste her life in a state of forlorn turmoil, I blame the society that produced her and celebrate the fact that romances like this are less common because they do nothing but damage to all parties involved.

I guess Mr. Zweig had not read psychoanalyst Darian Leader's book "Why do women write more letters than they post?" when he put his pen down; or maybe, despite the different time zone he did and decided to invert and take things a bit too literally. To make things as concise as possible, what is one of the arguments of the book, is that women question the addressee more than men do, and something cannot be put down in a woman's love letter, that is why what the title says happens.Mr. Zweig opts for the grand gesture of having one woman writing arguably just one letter in her life and sending it despite all odds; it seems that in her case nothing is lacking, even if her obsession with her object of love has significantly broken down. Most of the viewers already know how the story goes, yet let's take a step back.In a nutshell, what we see on screen is the narrative of a life-long infatuation with a man from a woman on the brink of death: she tells the story of her life as seen from early womanhood to early middle age and as seen through her encounters with her at first neighbor and finally clueless stranger with whom she is totally in love and with no interruption, even though he does not recognize her and even though she has his child.This pure 19th century gazette schlock is nevertheless pursued by Ophuls with undiminished gusto, finesse as if wrenching up all embellishment and turn of rondo and waltz to make the film into some kind of march with head up into deadly melodrama; he gives this second rate story its glorious second fate on screen.I will be a bit more precise: I find Mr. Zweig an unbearable bore; to play it Viennese-style he knows not what sostenuto and what legato is: all comes flat in his hand, if one has read some of his books, with all the humanist alibi already cracking after WWI.What I mean by this is that we are only once involved actively and empathetically in the film, and that happens when Lisa for once (and for all) staggers into the truth that the great pianist she has always loved not only does not remember her, but is an almost senile Don Juan babbling the same old story from woman to woman, from one nightly routine to the next. And here we may admire the team work shining through: Fontaine passes a glimpse of pity and despair through the recognition of what Stefan really is, that is pity for him and a despairing self-esteem for her; Jourdan glides into his world-worn gags, and although he seems to me somewhat anxious throughout the film, he delivers a performance mixing up burdensome repetition and - what is truly great - making visible through his slightly lecherous character pity and terror.I am not so sure this stands for Fontaine; each time we see her older what strikes us is that her appearance is conceived in terms of visual metamorphosis, that is regarding age and lighting. Although there is a grand design in the conception, something is amiss when this steals the scene. It is also a case of involuntary irony when the male leader is the stealer as I think Louis Jourdan is and is supposed to be actually when you think of it, but maybe this is the crux of the matter: it is as if Mr. Zweig has stepped into the time when Don Juan cannot make his mechanisms go on, he suffers from repression, entering the Freudian era, courtesy of Mr. Zweig's friend Sigmund, that is why - as if the roles between old man and old world woman were inverted - his character is the one with the overflow of affected narcissism.All this may be great, but we do not have a book called "Zweig and his time", what we have is the definitive book on let's say what Vienna was about,"Hofmannsthal and his time" which presents us the extra spritzy operatic and far more complex ironies Mr. Zweig being a humanist/melodramatist lacks. If one has seen, say, "La Ronde" by the same Ophuls, after Schnitzler's (another Viennese) work, will recognize what the Viennese hell we are talking about the director and his actors simply being spontaneously tuned to such material.