Home > Letter From an Unknown Woman [VHS]

Browse Amazon

Apparel & Accessories

Beauty

Jewelry

see larger picture

Staring: Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan, Mady Christians, Marcel Journet, Art Smith
Director: Max Ophüls
Average Customer Rating:

List Price: ~~$14.98~~
Our Price: $44.97

Product Details
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9780782008470
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, NTSC
ISBN: 078200847X
Label: Republic Pictures
Manufacturer: Republic Pictures
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Republic Pictures
Release Date: 1998-01-01
Running Time: 86
Studio: Republic Pictures
Theatrical Release Date: 1948

What similar items do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item?

Editorial Review
Amazon.com essential video
"By the time you read this letter, I may be dead," reads aging bon vivant Louis Jourdan from a letter found in his tiny hotel room. With tousled hair and a tux tired from yet another night of meaningless flirtation, he's startled by these opening lines and suspends his preparations to flee a duel in order to read the history of a love affair that he can't remember. For the rest of the film we're transported to the life of Joan Fontaine's awkward young Viennese woman, who has been hopelessly enthralled by the dashing pianist ever since adolescence. For a moment she was his lover, the emotional pinnacle of her life but for the philandering rogue simply another fling in a blur of women passing through his bedroom. This was Max Ophüls's first personal project in Hollywood, and he injects this exquisitely stylish romantic melodrama (based on a novel by Stefan Zweig) with his continental sensibility. Both lush and restrained, the endlessly moving camera tracks, cranes, and circles around the characters while maintaining a measured distance. Fontaine delivers one of the best performances of her career, vulnerable and yearning without lapsing into sentimentality--and ultimately showing a hidden strength as she risks all for one more moment with the love of her life. Jourdan is genial and callow, an empty figure faced with the meaningless of his life and shamed with self-discovery. It's a sensibility more European than American, right down the empty gesture that concludes this sad melodrama. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

ALL TIME GREAT, 2009-06-17
I FIRST SAW THIS MOVIE 51 YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS 12 OR 13 YEARS OLD. I FELL IN LOVE WITH THIS MOVIE AS WELL AS PORTRAIT OF JENNIE. I KNOW BY TODAY'S STANDARDS ITS A SILLY MOVIE BUT I STILL LOVE THIS MOVIE. I WATCH IT NOW AT LEAST ONCE A YEAR.

Another Ophuls gem., 2009-03-11
In the hands of another director LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN becomes a mundane, weepy, romantic melodrama, with a trite and fairly unbelievable story line. In the hands of Max Ophuls, it becomes a profound statement of lost love, lost hope, and lost opportunity. Through his distinctive mise-en-scene encompassing fluid camera work, moody cinematography, essential setpieces and thematic devices, Ophuls turns this tearjerker into a piece of cinematic poetry. What is particularly effective to me, is Ophul's almost musical way of using recurring motifs at critical junctures to either echo or contrast the emotional states of his main characters at different points in time. It not only adds emotional depth to the narrative, but balance and aesthetic beauty to the whole structure. Train departures are prevalent motifs in his films, and in LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, we have first Stefan (Louis Jourdan), and later Stefan Jr. leaving on a train and promising to see Lisa (Joan Fontaine) again in 2 weeks. Neither promise would be fulfilled but for tragically different reasons. Sumptuous interiors, staircases, and doors are ubiquitous elements in Ophul's work. Characters move through them like intricate clockwork to reach their fated destinies. When the young Lisa first enters Stefan's apartment it changes her life, and much later, near the end of the film, she enters the same apartment and her life is dramatically altered again. I am a huge admirer of Ophul's work, and LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN is in my opinion, his finest American film, perhaps only surpassed by his masterpiece,THE EARRINGS OF MADAME de.

I had expected something more, 2010-03-28
After reading the overwhelmingly positive reviews here and on "TCM", I had expected this movie to blow me away. However, it did not. (Warning, I reveal some things about the plot in this review.)

It's a good movie, and I'm glad I saw it once. But I wouldn't put it in my "top" movies that I would want to see again, or that I would recommend that others go out of their way to view.

Fontaine played her character well, and it was remarkable how she could convincingly play a teenager, a woman in her 20s, and a woman in her 30s. Jourdan was a little bit wooden, to me, but I don't know much about his other work, except for his film with Doris Day, and I also thought he wasn't very multi-dimensional in that one.

I found the story itself frustrating.

I can of course see the romantic elements in it, and I certainly have had unrequited love myself and know that it can lead one to do all manner of foolish things and it can play tricks on the mind. However, this woman exhibited behavior that today would be seen as stalking-lite, and she surely was off-balance about this man (not in a sweet romantic way, but in a mentally-ill way) for years before their one-night-stand. It's only because his head was easily turned by any pretty thing in a skirt that they ever went on their one real "date" in the first place. Additionally, this girl was "mysterious" to the point of being unbelievable (wouldn't tell him her name, wouldn't describe anything about herself, wouldn't contact him directly after her life changed suddenly, in a situation where every reasonable woman would have, especially in that time period when women of her social class didn't have much personal power on their own in society and didn't often support themselves as single mothers). [And the story is set in Austria, where even today it's much more of a male-dominated, conservative, Catholic-infused society than the US is.]

I'm a female, and I've been hurt my fair share of times, but I don't know what this guy (bearing in mind that he was young, handsome, self-absorbed, artistic, famous, popular, easily-distracted and immature) was supposed to do exactly, when Fontaine's character made it all so easy for him to meet her, have his way with her on the first date, and forget about her after his 2-week trip to Milan with a gaggle of other women. Although I didn't know it when I was young, and am still not good at it now, I've learned that you have to guide most guys a little bit into realizing what they feel and want, because often when they are young, they make short-term decisions and have a bit of myopia. I could sort of understand her silent admirer/victim behavior before she found out she was pregnant, but afterwards, there were several ways she could have approached the situation, but she just waited for him to come see her when he got back from his trip, and he didn't. People who have options but refuse to take them, thinking that fate will intervene for them, and if it's meant to happen, it will happen all by itself, are so frustrating. He didn't go see her after his trip not because he hadn't liked her a lot on their date, but because he had so many girls revolving in and out of his life that he didn't need to fixate on one. And maybe, not to be moralistic about it, because I'm quite a realistic person, but maybe since she slept with him a few hours after meeting him, any challenge was over, and in his mind, he was off to the next new experience.

I also have a problem with the idea that this guy had a son, living in the same town, but was never told about it. Even if Fontaine's character wanted to be a forgotten martyr, she still could have let him know that he had a child, for the good of both him and his child.

It's not as if this man had been her long-time boyfriend and had callously dumped her after knowing the full facts of the situation - she was some girl he picked up on the street while she was standing there mooning after him, who slept with him after being acquainted with him just a few hours, but who was too shy to tell him her name. And he obviously liked her enough to figure out where she worked the next day, and to explain that he was leaving town for a while, but really liked her, and wanted to see her again when he got back. Yes, in a perfect (crazy girl's) world, he would have arrived back from Milan with red roses and a ring or something, but if you've got the chutzpah to lie to your friends/family that you have a secret engagement (when you don't), to move to a big city on your own as a very young woman in 19th-century middle Europe and get yourself a job and a place to live, surely you can manage to strategically "run into"/re-charm/contact a guy who made it very clear that he liked you a lot, but whom you haven't heard from in a little while.

How did she have the courage to tell her husband who the father of her child was, and then to confide in her husband that she was still in love with Jourdan's character and was willing to break up her new, stable, wealthy marriage to go to him, if she didn't have the courage to ever approach Jourdan after he came back from Milan or after she found out she was pregnant or in the 9 years since she had his son? He was some kind of idealized god to her, and it's almost as if she wanted to be misunderstood and hurt by him. His kind of character IS often a heartless jerk to women, but in this story, I couldn't really blame him, except maybe for having a short attention span and for not being very good at remembering faces.

I remember when I was on an exchange program in Europe, about 21 years old, and a fellow American student who lived in my dorm had gone to see another city on her own, got lost, and in the wee hours was wandering through a bad neighborhood, crying, trying to find the train station. Someone approached her with a knife and stole her purse. She called and had my roommate buy her a return train ticket for her over the phone. When she got back to the dorm after her horrible experience, she told us the story, but she refused to tell the authorities and refused to call her credit card companies and her bank to let them know her things had been stolen and to freeze her accounts. I remember pleading with her to call the bank and the card companies, and I offered to make the call for her, if she was afraid to. She simply didn't want to think about it anymore, and was resigned to having all her money taken out of her checking account, which, a couple of days later, it was. (I don't think that she was lying to us and had gambled away the money or bought something really expensive that she didn't want to admit to - she was just a timid little thing.) Frustrating. That's asking to be a victim. I'm not sure what kind of mentality a person has to have to think that just giving up before even trying to help yourself is noble, but I think it's a poor role model for young women and young men if this film is held up to be a tale full of nostalgia and romance, instead of a portrait of emotional/mental instability and shockingly poor judgment on the part of the lead female character.

One of the old classic's, 2010-01-30
It is one my sister and I watched more than a few times.Great impact,Wonderful acting from Louis Jordan and Joan Fontaine.Setting was also great.5 Stars all the way....

Movie Review, 2010-05-10
Received product in good condition. Supplier was easy to work with and I would purchase from them again. Thanks.

Links