"Madame de. . . was a very lovely, elegant and adulated woman. It seemed that she could look forward to a serene, uncomplicated life. And probably nothing would have happened were it not for this jewel. . . "

So begins the prologue of The Earrings of Madame de. . . If we follow the Earrings as if they have a will of their own, the film becomes almost comic in its convolutions and complications:

A general has given a pair of diamond Earrings to his wife, Louise (Madame de. . .), who secretly sells them back to a jeweler to cover a debt, pretending to have lost them at the opera. The jeweler sells the Earrings back to the general, who in turn gives them to his mistress, who loses them at a roulette table in Constantinople. There they are bought by an Italian baron, who, on his return to Paris, encounters Louise: He falls for he at first sight. In a series of Strauss waltz sequences, the most dazzling romantic courtship in film history is conducted before the probing eyes of the Parisian Belle Epoque aristocracy.

The turning point of the film involves the reappearance of the Earrings in the possession of the baron. When he presents them in secret to the general's wife, she is at first astonished by their seemingly miraculous reappearance, but then decides to pretend she has found them in a pair of old gloves so she may where them in public. For his part, the general is equally dumbfounded, but he, of course, knows something his wife and her lover don't. But the general acts decisively, and in a series of transactions the rondo is continued: The general forces the baron to sell the Earrings back to the jeweler, who sells them back to the general, who then forces his wife to give them as a gift to a young niece. The baron abandons Louise because she has deceived him about the Earrings as well.

But though the romance is dead, the Earrings themselves blaze in Louise's heart with a new fierceness. The ultimate crystallization of the Ophulsian style has transfigured the Earrings from mere ornaments to sacred emblems of love. After having told many small lies, Louise steadfastly tells the truth about the deepest emotion of her existence.

The bare bones of the plot, deceptively transparent, cannot convey the profundity of feeling nor the perfection of style that make The Earrings of Madame de. . . one of the enduring masterpieces of the classical cinema. The sublime performances of Danielle Darrieux as Louise, Charles Boyer as the general, and Vittorio de Sica as the baron imbue the characters with physical and spiritual dimensions beyond the powers of the printed page. And below the glittering surfaces, the lush decor, the sensuous fabrics, there is the wistful sensibility of an artist mourning the death of this world and all other worlds to come. Inside his beautiful ladies and lovers of romance lurk the grimacing skeletons of tragedy.

The Earrings of Madame de. . . has inspired arcane post-Marxist and post-Freudian speculations about fetishism in economic and sexual transactions. As is often the case with these theoretical formulations, the seamless fluidity of the narrative, with its saving graces of wit and humor, is overlooked for a turgid accumulation of ideological digressions.

Similarly, some aestheticians have virtually caricatured the Ophulsian style as a mania for camera movement for its own sake. But Ophuls is much more than the sum of all his camera movements. What is often overlooked in his oevre is the preciseness and fairness of his sensibility. His women, such as Danielle Darrieux's Louise, may dominate subjectively, but his men are never degraded objectively. Quite the contrary. Boyer is proudly and poignantly stoical about his wife's never having truly loved him, and de Sica is a true aristocrat., gallantly facing his fate.

Ophuls' elegant characters lack nothing and lose everything. There is no escape from the trap of time. Not even the deepest and sincerest love deters the now from its rendezvous with the then, and no amount of self-sacrifice can prevent desire from becoming embalmed in memory. This is the ultimate meaning of Ophulsian camera movement: Time has no stop. Montage tends to suspend time in the limbo of abstract images, but the moving camera records inexorably the passage of time, moment by moment. As we follow the Ophulsian characters, step by step, up and down streets, and round and round the ballroom, we realize their imprisonment. We know that they can never escape, but we know also that they will never lose their pride and grace for the sake of futile desperation. They will dance beautifully, they will love deeply, they will die bravely, and they will never whine nor whimper nor even discard their vanity. And in The Earrings of Madame de. . . their magical poise becomes the stuff of magnificent poetry.

--Andrew Sarris

Andrew Sarris is the film critic at The New York Observer and a professor of film at Columbia University.

Cast

Madame de. . . ...Danielle Darrieux

The general ... Charles Boyer

Baron Fabrizio Donati ... Vittorio de Sica

Monsieur Remy ... Jean Debucourt

Monsieur de Bernac ... Jean Galland

Henri de Maleville ... Hubert Noel

Nanny ... Mireille Perry

Lola ... Lia di Leo

Credits

Directed by Max Ophuls

Screenplay by Marcel Achard, Max Ophuls, & Annette Wademart

From the novel by Louise de Vilmorin

Music by Oscar Straus & Georges van Parys

Director of photography Cristian Matras

Art director A. J. d'Eaubonne

Wardrobe by Georges Annenkov & Rosine Delamare

Chief editor Borys Lewin

Production managers H. & R. Baum

About the transfer

The Earrings of Madame de. . . was transferred from a 35mm duplicate negative in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.33:1.

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