443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de...

[Matt]

Has anybody listened to the PT Anderson "introduction" on the Earrings disc? It's downright embarrassing... I sincerely hope he was stoned, because that's the only real explanation for some of his observations and insights he has on the film.

Yes, it's really terrible. Easily one of the worst Criterion "supplements" ever. It's clear he just turned on a tape recorder and rambled for fifteen minutes without even so much as watching the film beforehand as preparation.

[Svevan]

I think I agree with Chris' assumption that this was a failed commentary track that Criterion salvaged as an "introduction." I didn't hate it though.

[Florinaldo]

I must say I did not find it to be the total wipe-out others have said it was. True, it is disjointed because he is jumping between scenes far apart in the movie; it may have been designed that way, or be indeed the salvageable bits from a failed commentary. But he brings a specific perspective, that of a filmmaker looking at another one's work. and some of his insights and observations are indeed quite relevant or interesting.

BUT, it certainly should not have been labeled an "introduction" to the movie; ""various thoughts" might have been a better choice. Am I wrong in remembering it was not part part of the first announcement for extras on this DVD (or I may be confusing it with another of their Ophüls titles).

One observation about the Madame de... packaging: I find my copy of the cardboard case is just a bit too tall for the booklet and DVD digipack to fit snugly into it and they keep trying to fall out whenever I pick it up. Is that a common experience? If so, a small black mark for Criterion. The fit is better on their editions of similarly packaged The Furies and Mr Arkadin.

[GringoTex]

Just finished the Criterion. It's amazing how much more I love this film now than when I watched the rotten R2 transfer. It's all in the image. I can't even remember a single line of dialogue in the film, because the images tell everything.

Tag Gallagher's visual essay is fabulous. I hope they use him over and over again.

And Orson Welles could only dream of such virtuostic camera work.

[Tommaso]

Have just watched "Madame de...". I have to agree that the Anderson 'introduction' is about the worst supplement I ever encountered on a CC disc. If this was intended as an audiocommentary originally, I guess the final result would have easily outdone the commentaries on the MGM Bergmans for sheer atrociousness. I wonder how people can find anything worthwhile in this; I mean more or less the only thing he says is "OH MAN, this is TERRIFIC" without explaining why he finds it terrific. That it's terrific should be the most obvious thing to see for anyone watching this marvel of a film. And labelling something as 'Introduction' that basically gives away all the major sequences in the film is a crime against anyone who hasn't seen the film before.
But apart from Anderson, this indeed is a TERRIFIC package (and transfer!). I'm happy to have decided to read the Vilmorin story before watching the film, and I was amazed how much the changes that Ophuls introduced altered the feel of it, even though I quite liked the story itself. Whereas the story is a nicely constructed and very formalistic ironic take on aristocratic society (a little like Cocteau without the magic) without much depth to it, the Ophuls version is a wonderful and touching social and character study for the most part. That Vilmorin so completely dismisses it is lamentable, but I can somehow understand it, as it almost reverses her original satirical intentions.
The funniest thing about the Vilmorin interview, however, is how she constantly fiddles around with that twig in her hands, as if it was some makeshift cane with which she'd love to punish Ophuls for his crimes. I wonder what she did with Malraux when she was his mistress....

[jbeall]

I haven't watched Earrings, but the supplements on La Ronde are nice, esp. the Alan Williams interview. He gives a ton of context and some good technical info as well. It was probably the best supplement I've seen this year.

[Tommaso]

I've just watched the CC "La Ronde", and have the feeling that I should speak up a bit for this somewhat heavily criticized transfer. Obviously, the image is indeed inferior compared to "Madame de...", but it's equally obvious that the problems are due to the source materials and have also been somewhat exagerrated in my view. I didn't find the occasional vertical lines immensely distracting, for instance, though the digitallyobsessed review would suggest otherwise. They are thin, non-intrusive and often barely noticeable. Perhaps I've grown soft over the years and got used to such damage from all those silents I watch...
The image, while sometimes soft, is almost constantly very detailed and contrast appears to be surprisingly unmanipulated for a CC disc (this also helped to make my decision to buy the CC "Plaisir" rather than the Second Sight soon). Sure, it's on the dark side, but remember that most of the film is actually supposed to play at night, and in the few scenes brightly lit, well, it looks bright without being blown out. I hope Nick won't get angry should he be among those who don't like this transfer, but I'd say: in it's film-like appearance this looks more like an MoC disc than a CC, and I mean that as a compliment.

As to the film itself: wonderful wonderful wonderful. I guess I liked it even better than "Madame de...", probably because Ophuls style is less self-conscious here and always completely serves the film and its construction, while in the famous dance sequence in "Madame" (for instance), the virtuosity draws attention to itself very conspicuously. "La Ronde" greatest asset for me is Walbrook, though. I didn't imagine he could top his performances in "Blimp" and "Red Shoes", but he actually even refined both his dandyish appearance as Lermontov and the extreme likeability of Kretzschmar-Schuldorff and brings these aspects together in this film to marvellous effect. Even though he is the master of ceremonies, he exudes a constant feeling for his 'puppets', and while one might describe the film's world-view as cynical, there is a sense of acceptance of the blind erotic urge that motivates the characters, and thus a lot of compassion and humanity here, too. Magnificent visuals, music and acting all around. A perfect and very endearing film.

[perkizitore]

Can anyone comment on La Ronde's picture quality compared to the Second Run release?I am waiting for a Beaver comparison,but until then i would appreciate any help.

[Jonathan S]

Can anyone comment on La Ronde's picture quality compared to the Second Run release?I am waiting for a Beaver comparison,but until then i would appreciate any help.

Although not a comparison, you might be interested in this DVD Times review if you haven't seen it already.

According to this review - and contrary to indications earlier in this thread - the Second Sight release has optional subtitles and contains the Gélin interview also on the Criterion.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Here a screenshot comparison between the Criterion NTSC-DVD and the version aired on the german-french ARTE-television channel this year.

[Tommaso]

Well, I can't help but finding that TV cap contrast-boosted, even though arte normally don't seem to do such things. From the dvdtimes review I'd assume that image quality of the Second Sight is pretty similar to the CC, as the reviewer finds it too dark (which for the CC I would refute, as said before).

[Michael]

Been waltzing through the CC Ophuls and probably once more again this New Years. What luxurious films! Never thought this would happen but Le plaisir is growing to become the favorite.

For those of you who have seen Madame de..., I'm curious to know what your initial reaction to its final frame was.

SpoilerShow

It's almost like Rosebud with that last close up of the earrings. Do you think Madame de.. die?

[Haggai]

Been waltzing through the CC Ophuls and probably once more again this New Years. What luxurious films! Never thought this would happen but Le plaisir is growing to become the favorite.

For those of you who have seen Madame de..., I'm curious to know what your initial reaction to its final frame was.

SpoilerShow

It's almost like Rosebud with that last close up of the earrings. Do you think Madame de.. die?

Yes, I think that's what happens beyond the final scene.

When I saw a screening of Letter From An Unknown Woman earlier this year, I noticed that the ending was quite similar:

Letter From An Unknown Woman spoilerShow

Even though the result is not revealed, since the movie ends just as they're going off to the duel, it seemed clear that the Jourdan character has accepted his fate and is going off to his death.

[Michael]

Returning to the Ophuls again and again ..and again since I received the discs. Does anyone find La ronde a bit slight? It feels more like an overture to what's next: the most sublime Le plaisir.

There's a ravishing, maybe the most ravishing ever!, romance in Madame de... Madame's journey from being a selfish woman to completely resigned to passion, I find so incredibly moving. It is really heartbreaking that Criterion didn't give it a diamond treatment it so well deserves - cheap packaging, worthless introduction, embarrassing commentary, etc. What was Criterion thinking?!

Le plaisir is growing to be my favorite Ophuls. I'd like to know what you think of the last piece, I still don't know what to make of it. It feels a bit rushed, whittling away character developments, almost feeling like a generic love story. Not my favorite piece but the pieces before that are among the greatest things I've seen in all universe. I'm hoping someone will shed a new light on this last piece.

[Tootletron]

And labelling something as 'Introduction' that basically gives away all the major sequences in the film is a crime against anyone who hasn't seen the film before.

Most of the time when a Criterion has an "Introduction", I always watch it last because it always gives away something. I think Scorsese's introduction gives away the ending to La Strada, and there's another one out there that's pretty spoilery.

[GringoTex]

There's a ravishing, maybe the most ravishing ever!, romance in Madame de... Madame's journey from being a selfish woman to completely resigned to passion, I find so incredibly moving. It is really heartbreaking that Criterion didn't give it a diamond treatment it so well deserves - cheap packaging, worthless introduction, embarrassing commentary, etc. What was Criterion thinking?!

But the Gallagher essay, interviews and source story are all stellar. Plus, it's the only acceptable transfer of the film out there.

Le plaisir is growing to be my favorite Ophuls. I'd like to know what you think of the last piece, I still don't know what to make of it. It feels a bit rushed, whittling away character developments, almost feeling like a generic love story. Not my favorite piece but the pieces before that are among the greatest things I've seen in all universe. I'm hoping someone will shed a new light on this last piece.

Plaisir has also become my favorite Ophuls. I think the last piece suffers coming after the middle piece, which standing on its own is the greatest short film or featurette I've ever seen. Try what I did- which is watch the last piece by itself some tiime. I appreciated it a lot more.

[Max von Mayerling]

Also, on the last piece of Le Plaisir - check out the special features on the dvd. I think they do a pretty good job of explaining why it feels the way it does. (If only he had made the third portion he originally intended...) And the special features also heightened my appreciation for the technical aspects of the last story.

I share the excitement about this film. I'm also really haunted by the first story. I find it very frightening, very bleak, very fairy-tale like ... and yet it is also totally real to me. Amazing. And, of course, amazing images.

[Florinaldo]

Returning to the Ophuls again and again ..and again since I received the discs. Does anyone find La ronde a bit slight? It feels more like an overture to what's next: the most sublime Le plaisir.

There's a ravishing, maybe the most ravishing ever!, romance in Madame de... Madame's journey from being a selfish woman to completely resigned to passion, I find so incredibly moving. It is really heartbreaking that Criterion didn't give it a diamond treatment it so well deserves - cheap packaging, worthless introduction, embarrassing commentary, etc. What was Criterion thinking?!

Le plaisir is growing to be my favorite Ophuls. I'd like to know what you think of the last piece, I still don't know what to make of it. It feels a bit rushed, whittling away character developments, almost feeling like a generic love story. Not my favorite piece but the pieces before that are among the greatest things I've seen in all universe. I'm hoping someone will shed a new light on this last piece.

The three Ophüls titles each have their own personality and offer specific plesaures; from the delicate charm of Plaisir to the tragedy of Madame de... , with the ironic distance of La Ronde in-between, they are a film-lover feast.

Regarding La Plaisir, Ophüls wished initially to use another story by Maupassant, La Femme de Paul, but it was abandoned for budget reasons; the story takes place in a riverside brasserie that is lavishly decorated for a celebration of some sort. Le Modèle is on a much smaller scale. It was to star also Gélin and Simon.

As for the Madame de... edition, I don't feel the commentary is embarrassing; on the contrary, I quite liked the insights from Susan White and her colleague. I have already expressed in this thread my opinions regarding the physical packaging and the meandering "introduction".

[Michael]

As for the Madame de... edition, I don't feel the commentary is embarrassing; on the contrary, I quite liked the insights from Susan White and her colleague. I have already expressed in this thread my opinions regarding the physical packaging and the meandering "introduction".

I thought the commentary was kind of tiring and pretentious but GringoTex just reminded me here that the visual analysis of Madame de... is really fantastic.

[Florinaldo]

Further on the abandoned third segment of Le Plaisir: If you do a Web search , you'll find that the unfilmed Maupassant story is available online, in French. It looks complete, following a quick comparison to the book version. If you can read French, it will give you an idea of what might have been if the money had been available for Ophüls to film it. It later became a distant basis for Godard's Masculin-Féminin, mixed with other Maupassant sources and Godard's very personal take, of course.

I thought the commentary was kind of tiring and pretentious but GringoTex just reminded me here that the visual analysis of Madame de... is really fantastic.

Just like with the movies themselves, we each have different reactions and opinions to commentaries; you obviously won't change my mind and I won't change yours (although we do agree regarding the Gallagher essay).

[ezmbmh]

I'm forever grateful for my professor-friend who encouraged me to watch Madame de, he was sponsering and projecting several films at a Greenwich Village theater, damn I can't remember its name.. that was long time ago and it no longer exists.

Theater 80 St. Mark's?

And yes Michael, I have seen Madame de... and it is indeed an elegant and moving morality play. I couldn't tell you why Letter affects me so much, but the sentence would have to start with "the way Joan Fontaine..." She is just so earnest and loving in every scene of that film. "Why don't you break my heart one more time, just for good luck."

Interesting that you called Madame de.. a morality play. I can see that: lying, decieving, cheating, etc all end in tragedy. I've grown a strong detest for "morality" type of films for a few years now and I wonder if that's going to affect my refreshment of Madame de... when it comes out next month.

I’m getting into this conversation only a year or two late. With films I have great anticipation for I tend to wait until I’ve seen them before I plunge into the commentary (do, of course, scan enough to tell if the release is worth buying). Anyway, I’ve seen several Ophuls but somehow never Madame De till yesterday under odd circumstances, in a dark room off a bar in a fancy resort where my wife’s at a conference, an atrocious and atrociously loud easy listening cover band braying on the patio outside, me tucked over my Mac with a drink and thinking, Yeah, this’ll last one minute. So entranced I didn’t move till it was over (except to order more drinks) and even stopped hearing the cover band except for some reason when they launched into the silliest sappiest rendition of No Woman No Cry, when I decided to pee.

I’m still scrolling through all the pages so apologize if what I say has been covered, debated, shelved. So much amazing here, the tracking shots obviously but so much more than a mere technical flourish. Examples that stay with me are when the General, taking over his wife’s “recovery,” telling her she can’t go away, moves from window to window, closing the windows and curtains (on love and freedom), until, at the last one he looks down and all of a sudden emotion breaks through this utterly military man as he says “and I love you,” then closes the final drape. Or the dancing scenes not just tracking in shot but from one to the next and when the shit hits the fan we see the dancing continuing in the mirrors on the wall. Or how (not the tracking specifically) it takes a while before we see Madame at all, just the amazing wedding cake brocade of her boudoir, and when we finally do see her (and what a face!) it’s in the mirror, since beauty and knowing it and being watched for it are what she’s got, what she risks and loses, and what we enjoy tracking ourselves from the start.

The performances are superb. Melodrama easily shouldered aside, the way Darrieux actually morphs from sprightly beauty to haggard patient, the wonderful way both Boyer and de Sica, knowing all each other’s games, still play by the rules, until Boyer, the soldier, can’t take it, reaches for his pistol, while de Sica, the diplomat, can’t find a way to shrug either him or his love off. Wonderful, wonderful movie.

Somebody called it a morality play, and I say sure, as in you pay for your “sins,” but it’s much more. The way the society not only accepts but seems to require a bit (or several) on the side, the way the always inherent sexist basis comes out when Boyer—who’s had a side squeeze we can assume, every day of his life—is finally outraged at his wife, NOT that she’s screwing around, but that she’s made the one irrevocable error, fallen in love with someone else. The brilliant line he says to her, “You know, our relationship is only superficially superficial,” says it perfectly. This is a morality play the way Lolita is, meaning it isn’t really, it’s about the danger of finding a love so serious it observes no boundaries and demands everything be sacrificed for it. Society, religion (she prays for her lover), even God (who lets her die) may punish, sure as Quilty, but what stays is the way life can sweep in, turn everything upside down, and like the great swirling shots of the couple dancing closer and closer to their fate, make what you know and can’t know, the inside and outside and where you stand among them, impossible to distinguish.

PTA was useless, except in a director I admire going on record about a film he admires. The Gallagher was the aural and literal definition of phlegmatic but he had a point or two to make. I only listened to a couple of minutes of the, to my impatient ear, horribly stuffy academic commentary. Once I heard “fetish” and Freud’s theory of the unconscious in the same sentence, like Boyer (and Goebbels) I reached for my pistol.

Now I’ll read the rest of the posts and find out how I was wrong.

[Michael]

I'm forever grateful for my professor-friend who encouraged me to watch Madame de, he was sponsering and projecting several films at a Greenwich Village theater, damn I can't remember its name.. that was long time ago and it no longer exists.

Theater 80 St. Mark's?

Lovely post, ezmbmh. Theater 80 sounds awfully familiar but that's in East Village. I think the theater I had in mind was the Waverly, something like that.

[HerrSchreck]

The Waverly is on the West Side-- West Village-- on Sixth Avenue just by the W. 4th Street subway station. Not far from Washington Sq Park. It's now owned & programmed by IFC and is a sorta arthouse multiplex, the place having been broken into several smaller theaters. Generally a good screening repertoire, though of course biased towards IFC programming. I still prefer the nearby Film Forum, for their good programming taste.

And of course the Anthology... just make sure you wear a down jacket if you go in the wintertime as the place can be an unheated icebox.

[ezmbmh]

Thanks, Michael.

Theater 80 (closed now) came to mind because it was a wonderful venue for classic films, though heavily American. Saw my first Sturges there, Lubitsch, others. What I also remember is it was built right into the base rock of the island, you could see portions of it toward the front and sides.

[somnambulating]

Regardless of how informative it actually is, PTA's interviews etc tend to be entertaining, at the very least. If only this was up online elsewhere to see what he has to say. I already have Madame De and I don't think I'll be picking-up this version.