Short Take: The Earrings of Madame de...

Max Ophüls’ 1953 film The Earrings of Madame de… is an exquisitely made romantic tragedy. In Belle Époque France, the spendthrift high-society wife (Danielle Darrieux) of an army general (Charles Boyer) finds herself in debt. To pay off her creditors, she sells the diamond earrings he gave her years earlier as a wedding gift. After she covers for their absence by claiming they were lost or stolen, her jeweler, fearful of a scandal for his business, tells the husband of the sale. He is sanguine, and he repurchases the earrings as a going-away present for his mistress, who is leaving Paris for Constantinople. The mistress sells the earrings in Constantinople after losing her money gambling. They are then bought on a whim by an Italian diplomat (Vittorio De Sica). He takes them with him to Paris, where he meets the wife. The two fall in love. He makes a gift of the earrings to her. She accounts for their return by telling her husband she found them in her opera gloves. This first part of the story is a light-on-its-feet farce. Ophüls creates a relaxed atmosphere in the lavish setting with extraordinarily fluid staging and camerawork. The montage of ballroom dances in which the wife and the diplomat fall in love is especially impressive. The dances, which take place over several weeks, are so deftly edited together that it feels they occur in a single take. The movements of the camera, the two dancing, and the dancers around them combine to create a swooning quality. One can’t also help but admire how smoothly Ophüls shifts the tone from farce to tragedy in the film’s second half. His three leads all give fine performances, but the transition seems most enabled by the calm assurance of the filmmaking's flamboyance. The story never gets lost in the style, though. Ophüls builds the drama to a devastating ending, topped off with a moment of redemption from the wife. One may want to go back and savor Ophüls’ filmmaking mastery scene by scene in the way one returns to the better paragraphs of the finest prose writers. But part of the elegance being enjoyed is how effectively the story is told. The screenplay, adapted from a novel by Louise de Vilmorin, is credited to Marcel Achard, Ophüls, and Annette Wadamant. The marvelous sets were designed by Jean d’Eaubonne. The costumers were Georges (Yury) Annenkov and Rosine Delamare. Christian Matras was the cinematographer.

Short Take: Sisters

Brian De Palma’s 1972 film Sisters, starring Margot Kidder, is no longer a film that can be watched on its own terms. One can’t help but consider it relative to De Palma and Kidder’s other work. The picture is a horror thriller built around the mystery surrounding two separated Siamese twins (both played by Kidder) and the murder one of them commits. For De Palma, the film (like his subsequent Phantom of the Paradise) functions as a bridge between the cultural satire he was initially known for, and the thriller-suspense material that now defines his reputation. He’s at his best here with the cultural satire, specifically the lampoon of the Candid Camera TV show the film opens with. The thriller material is largely reworkings of elements from Alfred Hitchcock films—clever but ultimately empty. De Palma highlights the absurdities, but doesn’t go much beyond that. He has yet to develop the incisiveness with which he would investigate these tropes in his later efforts. He does provide the thrills, but the grisliness aside, it’s in a bare-bones, 1970s action-TV-series manner. Anyone expecting the gorgeous staging and camerawork that are the most admirable hallmarks of his mature style will be sorely disappointed. (He was still learning. Reportedly an extended tracking-shot treatment of a police apartment search was heavily reworked in the editing room because the footage looked too awkward.) Other steps toward the filmmaking style he developed, such as the use of split-screen, aren’t very deft. He was still learning his way with the actors, too. The dialogue scenes have a rather stilted quality. Margot Kidder is impressive, though. As the sister who’s center-stage, she speaks with a Quebecois accent, and is a warm, emotionally fluid presence. It’s a pleasant contrast to the brittle, anxious Lois Lane that defined her career in the Christopher Reeve Superman pictures. The best aspect of her work here is her ability to reconcile this softer manner with the violence a sister commits. The cast also includes Jennifer Salt as a ninny newspaper reporter, Lisle Wilson as the murder victim, and Charles Durning as a comic private detective. (The movie's final shot, featuring Durning, is a piece of surreal-absurdist tableaux that ranks with the best of Luis Buñuel.) The script is credited to De Palma and Louisa Rose. Bernard Herrmann’s musical score is a fine addition to the library of work he put together with Hitchcock and other filmmakers.