One of his earliest films is an abridged adaptation of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride starring Jarmila Novotna and Willi Domgraf-Fassbänder.

In his most perfect film Madame de… (retitled The Earrings of Madame de… in English), the heroine played by Danielle Darrieux sells her earrings to cover her debts. Then to disguise her actions from her husband, she pretends to have lost them and “discovers” their loss in her box during a performance of Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice while the Blessed Spirit sings its aria. Charles Boyer as her husband then heads out on a wild goose chase to find them returning to the performance just as Orphée (ironically) mourns “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice”!

But Letter from an Unknown Woman, my very favorite Ophuls film which he made during his years in Hollywood, also sets a crucial scene during an opera performance. In Vienna, the heroine and her husband arrive fashionably late to Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte just in time for the beginning of the second Act. During a sweeping crane shot, Lisa (in a remarkable performance by Joan Fontaine) spots Stefan, the man she has loved since girlhood, for the first time in years. As Papageno sings–again with crushing irony–“Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” (for some very odd reason performed in Italian), Lisa pleads illness and departs only to encounter Stefan outside the opera house, Their momentous re-encounter sets off a disastrous chain of events.

In less than ninety minutes, Letter depicts one of the most striking examples of romantic obsession on film. Based on a story by Stefan Zweig, it repays rewatching: sometimes one’s heart breaks for Lisa, while other times one despises the disastrous single-mindedness of her passion for the feckless Stefan.

The complete posted video of the film has warring subtitles (English and Arabic?) but it’s watchable; however, I’d recommend Olive Films’s beautiful DVD or Blu-ray version.

There are also many published analyses of Letter as well as numerous deep dive videos on YouTube. Rutgers Film in Print even published a fascinating volume that includes the screenplay and several invaluable critiques.

Ophuls’s American oeuvre includes two other exceptional films: the neo-noir The Reckless Moment, another doomed love story starring Joan Bennett (her greatest performance) and James Mason, and Caught which features one of the most perverse triangles in movies with Barbara Bel Geddes “caught” between Mason and Robert Ryan as a controlling monster reportedly based on Howard Hughes.

And then there’s Liebelei (in Geman) and La Signora di Tutti (in Italian) and the other three superb products of his post-war return to France: Le Plaisir, (the perversely divine) La Ronde, and (the frustrating yet marvelous) Lola Montès, Ophuls’s final work completed not long before he died at age 55.