Turner Classic Movies (TCM), the Ted Turner golden oldies network, saluted Louis Jourdan last week with a night of his movies, an evening that sure brought back memories. The highlight of the evening was the 1948 Letter from an Unknown Woman, based on a story by the tragic Stefan Zweig, a great writer who despaired of the world and ended his life by his own hand in South America during the second world war. The film does his story justice. It is about an egotistical concert pianist and his heedless treatment of a woman who has loved him since childhood. Louis Jourdan is the pianist, the wonderful Joan Fontaine is the almost biologically bewitched girl and later on woman.
For me, the real star is Vienna at the turn of the century. The film is black and white, and the Austrian capital is perfectly captured, insular and full of ghosts, with a faint, heady air of isolation and rotting elegance. The men wear top hats and white tie or uniform, the ladies have trains and veils and elaborate headpieces. Most of the action takes place behind heavy brocaded curtains. The mood of turn-of-the-century Vienna is one of doom and melancholy. The German director, Max Ophüls, gets every note right, even the wonderful waltzes sound morbid.
Vienna has been compared to a first-class opera performed by the understudies. How true. I’ve been there many times, and the saddest part was when I visited the Schoenburg Palace, on Schoenburg Strasse, where some squatters moved in on one of its floors immediately after the war and managed to ruin the most beautiful building in the city. My in-laws have done nothing about it and have left it uninhabited. One of my wife’s aunts lost all six of her sons with the Wehrmacht fighting in the east, and I somehow see her point.
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