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Figure ?. Irmgard von Cube in the 1940s. Courtesy of Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt/Main-Sammlung Straschek. LUTZ BACHER The Lost Bailan: Max Ophuls' Last Hollywood Project In biographical accounts ofMax Ophuls' career, his contributions to producer Walter Wanger's project of bringing Rosamond Lehmann's popular novel The Ballad and the Source to the screen are mentioned in passing, if at all, falling victim to a biographical short cut that originated with Ophuls himself. After he directed Wanger's The Reckless Moment in Hollywood, the story goes, he proceeded directly to The Duchess of Langeais project whose collapse in Paris in the fall of 1949 led immediately to his becoming a European director again with the making of La Ronde at the beginning of 1950. The source for this version of events is Francis Koval's spring 1950 interview of Ophuls for Sight and Sound, in which he said that "The Recldess Moment . . . led to the project of La Duchesse de Langeais. I actually came to Paris to shoot this famous novel with Greta Garbo and James Mason. As nothing came of it, ... I enthusiastically seized the chance of filming another famous Schnitzler subject: Der Reigen" (Max Ophuls 22). Though this was the truth, it was not the whole truth, and Balzac, Garbo, and Mason certainly made for a better story than Rosamond Lehmann and Joan Bennett. The wealth of primary sources available on the Ballad project's development in the Walter F. Wanger Papers at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and such reliable secondary sources as Matthew Bernstein's Wanger biography readily permit restoring Ballad to its proper place in the story of Ophuls' return to Europe.1 But the Wanger Papers also facilitate a much closer look at Ophuls' work on the project. They include the almost daily communications between Ophuls and Wanger during the latter's European travels in the spring of Arizona Quarterly Volume 60, Number 5, Special Issue 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1610 98 Lutz Bacher 1949, a period coinciding with Ophuls' efforts to provide an effective cinematic form for the adaptation of a complexly structured novel in a contentious collaboration with the screenwriting team of Irmgard von Cube and Allen Vincent. These documents illuminate the creative process to an extraordinary degree, while revealing Ophuls' enthusiasm for the material.2 Still, determining the extent of Ophuls' authorship of the final draft screenplay is problematic, complicated by the lack ofdaily communications after Wanger's return and by Ophuls' having to leave the collaboration five weeks before its completion to work on another screenplay. It becomes a matter of comparisons: of the early drafts with the final draft and of the latter with the earlier writing efforts of both Ophuls and von Cube and Vincent, loosely applying the "criterion stylistic paradigm " of Ophuls' films I devised for my study of his American career (Max Ophuls 5-9). But by making a case for the significance of Ballad in Ophuls' oeuvre, I am also arguing, ultimately, for the value of critical attention to un-produced screenplays, especially when they come at critical junctures in a director's career and "describe" the film-to-be as carefully as Ophuls.' The communications between production executives, producers, and directors at 20th Century-Fox, finally, shed light on certain qualities of the screenplay that precluded its going to production. Ophuls' modernist structure, arguably the most important aspect for him as preparation for similar efforts in France, may have been a major factor in its demise. In the motion picture industry's heady days of August 1945, Wanger paid the extraordinarily high price of $175,000 plus an additional bonus of $25,000, if U.S. sales exceeded 600,000 copies (they did), for Ballad's motion picture rights to Rosamond Lehmann, a contemporary of Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf and then deemed their equal. Bernstein noted that Wanger admired the novel's characters' '"constant search for happiness and truth in a world shackled by the chains of a bigoted culture,' and thought it would be a superb vehicle for Bergman " (Bernstein 265). But a treatment by Gina Kaus and two screenplays by Michael Blankfort...

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