THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE…

The most cherished work from French master Max Ophüls, THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE... is a profoundly emotional, cinematographically adventurous tale of deceptive opulence and tragic romance. When an aristocratic woman known only as Madame de... (Danielle Darrieux) sells a pair of earrings given to her by her husband (Charles Boyer) in order to pay some debts, she sets off a chain reaction of financial and carnal consequences that can end only in despair. Ophüls' adaptation of Louise de Vilmorin’s incisive fin de siècle novel employs to ravishing effect the elegant and precise camera work for which the director is so justly renowned.

"The titular jewels of THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE... provide not just the axis around which the film’s elegantly darkening roundelay turns, but also a telling stand-in for the essence of Max Ophüls’s art—an object of glittering surfaces which, through an astounding accumulation of passion, comes to embody devastating depths of feeling. Evanescence is an integral part of cinema, and no other director captured it as lyrically and yet as savagely as Ophüls. His tracking, dollying, gliding camera was never more mellifluous, or his visualization of life’s inexorable flow more tangible, than here." - Fernando F. Croce