Women of Letters

The first time I saw Letter from an Unknown Woman, I admired its craft and atmosphere but hated the story, about a woman who wastes her life in abject devotion to an unworthy man. A decade later I saw the film again, and found it as different as the heroine finds her beloved after ten years. Now it was not a tale of unrequited love, but a devastating anatomy of the illusions that lie at the heart of romance and even at the heart of our identities. The self-sacrificing woman and the self-absorbed cad both throw their lives away on false ideals, but their lives still have weight and beauty—so even do their ideals.

It is hard to think of another film that depends so crucially on the director’s skill at making the most delicate adjustments in mood and emotional shading. In almost anyone else’s hands, Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) would probably be either grossly sentimental or crassly cynical, but Max Ophüls’s subtle and scalpel-fine touch is a perfect match for the searing novella by Stefan Zweig on which the film is based. Fin-de-siècle Vienna, the native city of Ophüls and Zweig, was recreated on the backlot at Universal, and probably, like “Paris, Paramount,” better than the real thing. Letter opens with roué Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan) returning home in the wee hours before the morning on which he is scheduled to fight a duel. He has no intention of doing so, explaining in one of my favorite movie lines: “I don’t mind so much being killed, but you know how hard it is for me to get up in the morning.”

But then he reads a letter that tells him not only the story of its writer’s life, but the story of his own—a hidden double life he has never understood. The writer, Lisa (Joan Fontaine), has been watching and loving him ever since he moved into her apartment building when she was a young girl. Reading the letter, he sees himself through another’s eyes, an experience that would be unnerving for anyone. With her voice-over narration and point-of-view shots, Lisa is the film’s central consciousness—yet we are, presumably, seeing everything filtered through Stefan’s consciousness, as he visualizes the scenes she describes. These layers of memory and imagination, of construction by this mind and that mind, fit a film that demonstrates how fatally powerful the life of the mind can be.

In flashbacks, Lisa is the most benign of stalkers. A gawky, dreamy girl (the 31-year-old Fontaine is surprisingly credible as an adolescent), she falls in love with the handsome concert pianist almost before she sees him, as she hovers on the sidewalk watching his elegant furniture and objets-d’art being unloaded from a moving van. The introduction of a man through his possessions is a typical Ophüls gesture. One of the great architects of the cinema, he makes us feel we are moving through real spaces, surrounded by rich, detailed interiors. Spiral staircases are a movie cliché, but no director used one more gracefully than Ophüls does here. The way the camera creeps and glides up and down, peering from corners and sinking behind railings, puts us into the body of an agile, shy, curious girl. Lisa sneaks into Stefan’s apartment, stands at his door at night to listen to him play the piano, spies on him as he climbs the stairs to his flat with a woman. In one fleeting encounter, she opens the door for him and stands looking through the glass—so close, yet cut off by his ignorance of her existence.

Lisa never exists apart from her love for Stefan; she describes her first sight of him as her second birth, the birth of her identity. Her devotion is so self-willed, so pure an act of romantic invention, that she never seems entirely pathetic, even when—grown into a young woman—she stands for hours outside his apartment building in winter. One night he spots her and promptly picks her up; for both of them, the moment is so perfectly in character as to be inevitable. Stefan is no less a romantic idealist than she, but instead of fixing on one object, he obsessively searches for the woman of his dreams. He even has a bust in his apartment that represents this “goddess.” In practice, he’s a serial womanizer, abandoning each conquest when she turns out not to be the one. Whether his higher claims are merely self-justifying or not is ambiguous, since we see him through Lisa’s worshipful eyes and through his own.

And through these eyes, the one-night-stand they share might be the most sublime one-night-stand in cinema. It is a hushed, frosty winter night, and they go to a deserted amusement park, where they bond over their shared preference for the park in winter, when they can dream of spring. Stefan is taken with Lisa’s uncanny understanding of him: the character she has created in her mind, the half-imaginary man she loves, happens to be the same man he fancies himself to be. For one night they inhabit a shared fantasy, and it is genuinely magical, even as it reveals a fatal symbiosis by which they feed one another’s delusions. The perfect symbol of their relationship is an amusement-park ride where they sit in a train carriage while painted scenes of Venice or the Alps scroll past the window. When they have been through all of the different panoramas, Stefan tells the proprietor (who powers the illusion with a bicycle) to start over: “We’ll return to the scenes of our youth.” They savor nostalgia for the moment even before it ends.

Trains and cinema have run on parallel tracks from the beginning, and this enchanting scene pinpoints a link between railroads and movies. They both turn people into spectators, watching the world go by without being involved in it. Lisa, whose father used to take her on make-believe world travels when she was a child, prefers her love for the distant and unattainable Stefan to the courtship of an eligible young man or the generosity of the older man who ultimately marries her, knowing that she is the mother of an illegitimate child. It is surely no accident that trains are connected to the two cruelest blows in Lisa’s life, moments when reality breaks in ruthlessly: the train station farewell when Stefan departs, after their brief encounter, offering empty promises to return; and the parting from her (and Stefan’s) son on his way to school, when they first enter by mistake a quarantined train carriage, contracting the typhus that will kill them both.

Repeated motifs like this support the graceful structure of the movie. When Stefan takes Lisa to his apartment after their visit to the park, we see her walking up the stairs with him exactly as she once watched him with another woman. Repetition is also at the ironic heart of the story. Years after he abandoned her pregnant, Lisa encounters Stefan at the opera and he picks her up again—not so suavely this time but with overbearing, almost desperate need. He is older, worn-out and defeated: he has given up his career as a pianist because of his conviction that his playing wasn’t good enough. He would rather have nothing than be second-best. This development of Stefan’s character is entirely the work of Ophüls, screenwriter Howard Koch, and Louis Jourdan. They transform Zweig’s weightless character—who leads a charmed life of eternal youth, sensual adventure, and forgetfulness—into a man who suffers in his own way, without even knowing why.

As the younger Stefan, Louis Jourdan only needs his pretty face and Gallic charm, but in the later scenes he captures the exhaustion of a man whose wry wit has become bitter, whose lyricism has gone stale, whose charm is running on fumes. When Lisa comes to see him, betraying her husband, he goes through the seducer’s motions so mechanically it is grotesque. As he sends his valet out for “the usual things,” she realizes how threadbare and shabby her dream has become. The moment when he looks her over and smirks, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” is still a sickening blow.

Throughout this ravishingly refined movie, crude reality keeps appearing to remind us of what the central characters hold at bay with their idealizing imaginations. There is a coarse neighbor girl who, while young Lisa is exalted by Stefan’s piano playing, talks about the boys she lets grope her in the street. And Lisa’s final disillusionment, when she flees from Stefan after realizing he doesn’t remember her, is capped when she leaves his apartment and runs into a soldier who baldly propositions her—driving home the truth of what her great love amounted to.

When he finally looks up from the letter, which has been forwarded to him after the deaths of Lisa and her son, Stefan is in tears. What could be a mawkish moment is a piercing epiphany, as he realizes the terrible cost of his obliviousness. Before setting out at dawn, presumably to be shot by Lisa’s husband, he turns to his ever-present, mute valet (Art Smith), who reveals that he recognized and remembered Lisa. The valet, an understanding and compassionate observer incapable of interfering, is the human embodiment of Ophüls’s omniscient yet tactful camera. When Lisa declares in her letter that nothing happens by chance, she is taking refuge in fatalism, comforting herself with the belief that things couldn’t have turned out differently. But Stefan, summoning the memory of her loving face, realizes what he lost but could have had: in the end, perhaps his tragedy is even greater than hers.

Max Ophüls’s film was in fact the second adaptation of Zweig’s novella, though the first, Only Yesterday (1933), gives no screen credit to its obvious source. The basic lines of the story are unmistakable, but the setting, style, mood, and meaning are radically different. The nostalgic Viennese background is essential to Zweig and Ophüls; John M. Stahl’s pre-Code film is an American translation, at once more optimistic and more cynical. Instead of a concert pianist (in Zweig’s story the man is a writer), the love object of Only Yesterday is a wealthy stock broker. Instead of marrying an older man to support her fatherless child (Zweig’s heroine becomes a courtesan, but refuses to marry), Margaret Sullavan’s Mary Lane goes to work and becomes the successful owner of a dress shop. There is a bracing injection of feminist principles, yet the story is in some ways even more disturbing, because the man, Jim Emerson (John Boles), has none of Stefan’s complexities or shadings, none of his troubled romanticism or genuine charm. Perhaps the greatest difference between the two films is that Ophüls’s focuses on two individuals living in a private world of the imagination, while Stahl’s is about two representative types inhabiting a public sphere of social revolutions and world events.

Indeed, the title and official credit for Only Yesterday comes from Frederick Lewis Allen’s 1931 best-selling history of the 1920s. The film opens with a long and wonderful scene at a Park Avenue cocktail party on the day of the 1929 stock market crash. We have already seen a shoeshine man admit that he too lost money on the stock market, moments before his customer shoots himself in the men’s room. At the Emersons’ cocktail party, women swathed in clinging fur-trimmed gowns prattle foolishly; when one platinum blonde wonders if the Crash will mean she has to get a job, Franklin Pangbourn—at his swishiest—assures her, “My dear, you were born with a job.” A bespectacled young socialist rants about income inequality and economic justice, and another blonde tells him he’s “just an old crab.” When he draws himself up and retorts that he is a philosopher, she quips, “Same thing.”

“The bottom dropped out of the world today,” Jim says when he finally arrives. One of his friends has jumped out a window. He tells his mistress (we’ve already learned that the Emersons are both cheating on each other), “You’re broke. I’m broke. I don’t know anyone who isn’t.” Then he locks himself in his study and prepares to blow his brains out—but is distracted by the long letter he finds on his desk, which asks him to recall a girl he met more than ten years earlier.

The flashbacks begin with Mary and Jim meeting at a dance for soldiers going off to the First World War. Mary admits that she has had a crush on Jim for two years, since her first glimpse of him at another party. This is a far cry from Lisa growing up in the same building as Stefan, and Only Yesterday also eliminates the class element of her obsession: Lisa is poor and is drawn to Stefan’s world of art, culture and luxury, while Mary is well-off and simply stuck on a handsome face. Jim takes advantage of her confession, launching immediately into a heavy-handed and conventional seduction, talking about fate and moonlight. The scene has none of the real enchantment of the meeting in Letter, and comes off much more clearly as just what it is: a soldier deflowering a naïve girl on the eve of sailing overseas. Jim is made even more unsympathetic by the casting of John Boles, a screen presence so lifeless that might be a specimen of taxidermy. With his dead eyes and soft, expressionless voice, he makes Jim a blank cipher: it’s as though Mary spent her whole life in love with an Arrow collar ad. And while Stefan’s failure to recognize Lisa comes after ten years, John has already forgotten Mary after nine months! Her baby is born at the Armistice (there is a clever cut from combat footage of the trenches to the post-birth Mary, implying the painful battle of her labor), and she rushes to meet him in a victory parade, only to find he is with another woman and doesn’t know her from Eve.

Fortunately, the film does not dwell too much on her pining for Jim. Leaving her genteel Southern family after revealing her pregnancy, Mary goes to live in New York with her aunt Julia. Billie Burke gives a delightful and unexpected performance as Julia, managing even with her fluting and fluttering mannerisms to embody a smart, funny, open-minded New Woman. Julia tells Mary that women no longer need to be dependent, that they can face life honestly, and that the double standard is a thing of the past: there’s no reason to be ashamed of her out-of-wedlock child, it’s “just one of those biological events. It’s not tragedy, it’s not even good melodrama.” Indeed, no one ever seems to care that Jimmy, Jr., is illegitimate. He grows into a happy, pudgy child, and there is tremendous warmth and charm in the scenes of Mary’s life with Jimmy, Julia, and Julia’s boyfriend Bob, a sweet goofball played by comedian Reginald Denny. They make an eccentric, loving family; they all have plenty of money, Mary has a thriving career, and a nice if nerdy suitor who wants to marry her. Not a bad life.

Then, at a New Year’s Eve party ten years after their original meeting, Mary sees Jim again. When he picks her up, she at first thinks he recognizes her, but soon finds out the truth: “I couldn’t have forgotten anyone as lovely as you,” he coos in a taxicab. Where Lisa is devastated by the realization that Stefan doesn’t remember her, Mary accepts Jim’s memory lapse with a slightly bitter, shrugging resignation. She even seems to enjoy her private knowledge of his shallowness when he takes her to the apartment he maintains for trysts, and goes into the same cheesy, sentimental seduction routine he used before. And she sleeps with him again—but refuses to divulge her name, saying they should leave it at this, “just a perfect moment.” It seems we are meant to see Mary here as a mature woman with sufficient confidence and control to indulge her desire for a man while accepting that he will never return or comprehend the depth of her feeling. But Jim is such a smarmy, superficial cad that we can only feel this woman is lowering herself, and that as a couple they are fundamentally mismatched.

After this, the Stahl film degenerates into the soupiest and most predictable weeper. Out of nowhere, Mary develops heart failure and dies. Jim looks up from the letter he has received on her death, his face as mournful as a stuffed deer head. He tells his wife he is leaving her, that he has realized how empty his life was, but now he has something to live for; and he rushes over to tell Jimmy, Jr., that he is his father. This sticky scene of masculine bonding, as father admires son’s military school medals and promises to take him hunting, leaves a very bad taste in the mouth: Jim gets his own medal for bad conduct.

What is Only Yesterday really about? If there is any overarching theme, it is a generic one about facing up to life’s trials: there are wars, and stock market crashes, and men who abandon you pregnant, and mothers who suddenly die at 30, but life goes on and we might as well live it bravely and gaily. The film is salvaged from triteness by good dialogue, an appealing tone of frankness, and mostly fine performances. This was Margaret Sullavan’s screen debut, and though she was unhappy with her performance, she has just the right balance of sensitivity, vulnerability, and backbone. Her dry underplaying saves the character from too much pathos, and gives her real poignancy. Louise Brooks, who adored Sullavan, compared her famous plaintive, husky voice to “someone singing in the snow.”

But ultimately, Sullavan’s Mary just seems too sane and spirited to let one romantic disaster shadow her whole life, whereas Joan Fontaine’s Lisa lives so deeply inside her yearning fantasy that she has no real existence outside of it. With her wistful, glowing smile, Lisa seems wrapped in the perfume of her own imagination. Fontaine had a way of revealing the power lurking in her shy, feminine softness; in other performances this soft power could turn sly and smirking and manipulative, but here it becomes Lisa’s quiet persistence, her “iron will” as the Zweig story calls it. Sullavan has a flinty edge within her tiny slip of a figure and waif-like appeal (it was said she was the only actor who could bully Louis B. Mayer). Both women have a complexity that serves the essential ambivalence of the woman’s picture, a genre rooted equally in female victimhood and female victory. The basic principles go back to the earliest popular novels, the epistolary melodramas Pamela and Clarissa: suffering is woman’s lot, women’s lives are controlled by men, but women can triumph by telling their own stories, by writing the letters that carry their voices beyond the grave.                                                               

Stefan Zweig’s story has a kind of terrible simplicity, driving home just one burning idea: how much we don’t know about each other. It is an immensely powerful theme: it’s in the discovery by the husband in Joyce’s “The Dead” of the secret lost love his wife never told him about; in Everett Sloane’s beautiful speech in Citizen Kane about the girl on the ferry, whom he only saw for a minute but has never forgotten. We can never know other people’s inner lives, which magnify what is peripheral to us and make insignificant what we care about most. The nameless woman who writes the letter “To you, who never knew me,” keeps crying out again and again that the man she slavishly loved never recognized her. And in the end, when he finishes the letter, he still can’t really remember her, but he is touched by a reality other than his own: “he felt as if a door had suddenly and invisibly sprung open, and cold air from another world was streaming into his peaceful room.”

By Imogen Sara Smith