Max Ophuls: An Introduction

SUSAN WHITE Max Ophuls: An Introduction During the past several decades, "Ophuls" has perhaps been best known to the American public as a name on a marquee in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977). In that film, Alvy Singer (Allen's character) is obsessed with Marcel Ophuls' monumental work on the French Resistance (and lack thereof), The Sorrow and the Pity (1971), and feels a moment of triumph when, after their breakup, he glimpses ex-girlfriend Annie, a new convert to the importance ofHolocaust history , at a screening of the film. While for Alvy Singer as American Jew the intersection between the world historical moment and his own life seems perplexingly both indirect and absolute, for Marcel Ophuls and his father, Max Ophuls, whose works and legacy are examined in this issue of Arizona Quarterly, the world historical events of the past century had immediate and lasting effects on life and art. Exiled from his homeland because of the rise of Nazi Germany, Max Ophuls not only died a French film director but spent time as an American one, and through his artistry and craftsmanship made small but serious contributions to the film industries of Italy and Holland. Even in the august milieu of exiled German Jewish film directors of the 1930s and '40s, who left a powerful imprint on all aspects of the Hollywood film industry, Ophuls' career was an unusually international one. But despite the wide recognition his unique style has received from scholars and cinéphiles, and despite Allen's laudable publicity for the family name, Max Ophuls has remained relatively unknown outside this circle of aficionados. Max Ophuls was born Max Oppenheimer in 1902 in Saarbrücken, Germany. He took the name "Ophüls" (hereafter "Ophuls," for reasons Arizona Quarterly Volume 60, Number 5, Special Issue 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-16 10 2 Susan White I'll discuss below) in 1919, against the wishes of his respectable, business -oriented family, when he began a career as an actor. The actor very quickly became a director whose many projects took him to cities including Stuttgart, Dortmund, Wuppertal, Frankfurt, Breslau and Berlin . At the age of twenty-six, Ophuls became the youngest person to direct the Viennese Burgtheater, but was soon forced to resign in the face of rising anti-Semitism in Austria. (This stint at the Burgtheater, along with the fact that Ophuls made four films that took place at least partly in Vienna, created the persistent rumor that the director was himself Viennese.) Ophuls' theatrical work drew on many currents, from the traditional German (though in his case always innovative) theater to the most radical (modernist, Brechtian) European influences. While working in theater and radio in Berlin in 1932, Ophuls had a chance to try his hand at the film industry when he was hired as a dialogue director on an Anatole Litvak film at Ufa and then directed his own short film, "I'd Rather Have Cod Liver Oil." While Ophuls' first big success, an adaptation of Schnitzler's Liebelei, was still on screens in Germany in February, 1933, the burning of the Reichstag and ensuing events prompted the Ophuls family to flee to France, where Ophuls was naturalized as a citizen in 1938. Beginning with this period in France, Ophuls no longer used an umlaut in the spelling of his name, although in Germany he is still sometimes known as "Ophüls," and his name appears with an umlaut in some essays in this volume. For eight years Ophuls made films in France, Italy and Holland, including several melodramas featuring female focal characters (Divine [1935], La Tendre Ennemie [1936], Sans Lendemain [1939]—even his 1937 adaptation of Goethe's Werther was focused on the female protagonist ), a genre for which he would become well known during the course of his career. His 1934 Italian film, La Signora di Tutti, won the prize for best technique in an Italian film at the Venice Biennale.1 Signora is often described as anticipating his last film, Lola Montés, in its complex flashback structure and narrative about a woman exploited by the machinery of star production. In 1939-1940, Ophuls served...