Focus Features

Max Ophüls
La Ronde (1950)

Unlike the other prodigals discussed here, Max Ophüls was something of a nomad. He was born in Saarbrücken in 1902, but the territory passed from Germany to France under the Treaty of Versailles and Ophüls grew up speaking French with a German accent. Despite this, he forged his reputation on the Berlin stage in the 1920s and made his first films at UFA's famous studios in Neubabelsberg. Yet Ophüls's cosmopolitanism was evident from the outset, as he collaborated with the Hungarian Emeric Pressburger on the screenplay for his debut, I'd Rather Have Cod Liver Oil (1931), and recreated an entire Czech village in the hills outside Munich for his patter interpretation of Smetana's comic opera, The Bartered Bride (1932).

However, because he was Jewish, Ophüls had to flee the Third Reich after completing Liebelei (1933), a free adaptation of an Arthur Schnitzler play set in Hapsburg Vienna, and he worked in Italy and the Netherlands, and even contemplated offers from the Soviet Union, before becoming a French citizen in 1938. On the fall of Paris, two years later, Ophüls escaped to Switzerland. But his work permit depended upon a confession that he was a deserter from the Algerian regiment into which he had been conscripted and, so, he was forced to relocate to the United States in 1941.

Ophüls remained rootless in Hollywood, where he followed The Exile (1947), a romp about Charles II's Interregnum adventures in the Dutch Republic, by teaming with a couple of émigré actors: Louis Jourdan on Austrian Stefan Zweig's novella Letters From an Unknown Woman (1948) and James Mason on the nuanced noirs, Caught and The Reckless Moment (both 1949). Mason and Ophüls were also linked to Walter Wanger's production of Balzac's La Duchesse de Langeais, which was announced as a comeback vehicle for reclusive Swedish diva, Greta Garbo. However, Ophüls finally made an overdue return to Paris the following year to complete his career circle with the perfect itinerant property, as Schnitzler's La Ronde was a peripatetic reverie, whose largely French cast was completed by an Italian and a Viennese, whose chameleonic role had been devised by Ophüls and co-scenarist Jacques Natanson as the director's on-screen alter ego in order to keep the cynically romantic merry-go-round in motion.

La Ronde

The cycle starts with raconteur Anton Walbrook witnessing a carousel encounter between prostitute Simone Signoret and soldier Serge Reggiani. However, he is already courting Simone Simon, who is a maid to Daniel Gélin, whose dishonourable intentions towards her are deflected by his dalliance with Danielle Darrieux, whose wealthy husband, Fernand Gravey, is hoping to persuade Odette Joyeux to become his mistress. However, she is besotted with poet Jean-Louis Barrault, who is involved with the star of his play, Isa Miranda, who is being pursued by the aristocratic Gérard Philipe, who winds up seeking solace with Signoret because she reminds him of someone.

For all the sinuous elegance of Christian Matras's camerawork around Jean D'Eaubonne's evocative sets, La Ronde was less a return to a place than a state of mind. It is suffused with the amorous ambience and decadent indolence of the Austro-Hungarian capital in 1900, but Ophüls's primary intention was to recapture the mood of a time before world war wrought havoc on continental society. Indeed, he remained resolutely in a hybrid Franco-Germanic past for the all-too-brief remainder of his career, with only his unfinished biopic of Modigliani – which was completed by Jacques Becker as Montparnasse 19 (1958) – being set in the 20th century.

Next: Jean Renoir and French Cancan (1954)

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Max Ophüls
La Ronde (1950)

Unlike the other prodigals discussed here, Max Ophüls was something of a nomad. He was born in Saarbrücken in 1902, but the territory passed from Germany to France under the Treaty of Versailles and Ophüls grew up speaking French with a German accent. Despite this, he forged his reputation on the Berlin stage in the 1920s and made his first films at UFA's famous studios in Neubabelsberg. Yet Ophüls's cosmopolitanism was evident from the outset, as he collaborated with the Hungarian Emeric Pressburger on the screenplay for his debut, I'd Rather Have Cod Liver Oil (1931), and recreated an entire Czech village in the hills outside Munich for his patter interpretation of Smetana's comic opera, The Bartered Bride (1932).

However, because he was Jewish, Ophüls had to flee the Third Reich after completing Liebelei (1933), a free adaptation of an Arthur Schnitzler play set in Hapsburg Vienna, and he worked in Italy and the Netherlands, and even contemplated offers from the Soviet Union, before becoming a French citizen in 1938. On the fall of Paris, two years later, Ophüls escaped to Switzerland. But his work permit depended upon a confession that he was a deserter from the Algerian regiment into which he had been conscripted and, so, he was forced to relocate to the United States in 1941.

Ophüls remained rootless in Hollywood, where he followed The Exile (1947), a romp about Charles II's Interregnum adventures in the Dutch Republic, by teaming with a couple of émigré actors: Louis Jourdan on Austrian Stefan Zweig's novella Letters From an Unknown Woman (1948) and James Mason on the nuanced noirs, Caught and The Reckless Moment (both 1949). Mason and Ophüls were also linked to Walter Wanger's production of Balzac's La Duchesse de Langeais, which was announced as a comeback vehicle for reclusive Swedish diva, Greta Garbo. However, Ophüls finally made an overdue return to Paris the following year to complete his career circle with the perfect itinerant property, as Schnitzler's La Ronde was a peripatetic reverie, whose largely French cast was completed by an Italian and a Viennese, whose chameleonic role had been devised by Ophüls and co-scenarist Jacques Natanson as the director's on-screen alter ego in order to keep the cynically romantic merry-go-round in motion.

La Ronde

The cycle starts with raconteur Anton Walbrook witnessing a carousel encounter between prostitute Simone Signoret and soldier Serge Reggiani. However, he is already courting Simone Simon, who is a maid to Daniel Gélin, whose dishonourable intentions towards her are deflected by his dalliance with Danielle Darrieux, whose wealthy husband, Fernand Gravey, is hoping to persuade Odette Joyeux to become his mistress. However, she is besotted with poet Jean-Louis Barrault, who is involved with the star of his play, Isa Miranda, who is being pursued by the aristocratic Gérard Philipe, who winds up seeking solace with Signoret because she reminds him of someone.

For all the sinuous elegance of Christian Matras's camerawork around Jean D'Eaubonne's evocative sets, La Ronde was less a return to a place than a state of mind. It is suffused with the amorous ambience and decadent indolence of the Austro-Hungarian capital in 1900, but Ophüls's primary intention was to recapture the mood of a time before world war wrought havoc on continental society. Indeed, he remained resolutely in a hybrid Franco-Germanic past for the all-too-brief remainder of his career, with only his unfinished biopic of Modigliani – which was completed by Jacques Becker as Montparnasse 19 (1958) – being set in the 20th century.

Next: Jean Renoir and French Cancan (1954)

Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir
French Cancan (1954)

“The failure of La Règle du jeu (1939) so depressed me,” Jean Renoir confessed in My Life and My Films, “that I resolved either to give up the cinema or to leave France.” Fortunately, he decided upon the latter course and went to Italy to make La Tosca. However, when Mussolini declared war on France in June 1940, Renoir took up residence in his father Auguste's old house in Cagnes. While in southern France, he was invited to work for the Nazis, but opted instead to flee via Algiers, Casablanca and Lisbon to the United States, where he was granted a visa through the intercession of Robert Flaherty and Albert Lewin. He would not make another film on French soil for 14 years.

However, Renoir did make features with French themes and infuriated liberated audiences by seeming to trivialise the brutality of defeat in This Land Is Mine (1943) and to bowdlerise an Octave Mirbeau classic novel in The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946). It must have been with some trepidation, therefore, that he returned to the Francoeur Studios in Saint-Maurice to make his riposte to John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952), which would not only recall the Montmartre that had inspired Auguste Renoir and his fellow Impressionists, but also the sights and sounds of Jean's own youth. No wonder critic André Bazin opined that “Renoir is Impressionism multiplied by the cinema.”

French Cancan

This is essentially a tale of rehabilitation, as theatrical impresario Jean Gabin's bid to revive such old-fashioned, but contentious dances as the cancan and the chachut mirrors Renoir's own attempt to rebuild the domestic reputation that had all-but crumbled in absentia. However, by having Gabin flirt with both free-spirited ingénue Françoise Arnoul and mercurial belly dancer María Félix, Renoir was also expressing his admiration for the vivacity of La Belle France and for the more exotic allure of foreign climes. Furthermore, by invoking a belle époque that assuaged the humiliation of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the self-inflicted savagery of the Commune, Renoir was also seeking to reassure his audience that good times would just as surely return to a country that was still nursing the open wounds inflicted during the Occupation and Vichy. 

“I like French Cancan,” Renoir enthused, “because it gave me another chance to work with Jean Gabin. It was a return to the past.” However, this treatise on the nature of art and entertainment (“We artists are at the mercy of the men with money.”) could also have been seen as a response to François Truffaut's Cahiers du Cinéma calls for a nouvelle vague, as entrepreneur Zizi Danglard (Gabin) is an auteur aware that his creation both reflects and revitalises life. Renoir called this centrepiece of the Trilogy of Spectacle that also included The Golden Coach (1954) and Elena et les Hommes (1956), “a piece of tapestry, a composition in colours.” But Jacques Rivette came closer to the mark when he declared it “the most triumphant hymn the cinema has ever dedicated to its own soul.”

Next: Douglas Sirk and A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958)

Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk
A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958)

As with Fritz Lang, a degree of confusion surrounds Dietlef Sierck's flight from Germany. Actress wife Hilde Jary asserted in a TV interview that the couple had left Berlin on Christmas Eve, 1936. But Sierck only had his passport returned the following spring, when Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels sanctioned a trip to Tenerife to make La Habanera, in the hope that it would provide the same sort of populist entertainment as Zu Neuen Ufern (1937), Sierck's first collaboration with Swedish nightingale Zarah Leander. However, with Sierck's ex-wife, Lydia Brinken, denouncing Jary as Jewish, the pair wisely decided to slip away to Italy, where Sierck was supposed to be scouting locations for his next venture, Wiltons Zoo.

After detours to France and the Netherlands, Sierck was invited to the United States by Warner Bros. to remake Zu Neuen Ufern. Nothing came of the project, however, and Sierck, who steered clear of the other German émigrés in Hollywood because of what he perceived to be their contempt for all things American, was reduced to running a chicken farm in Southern California. Eventually, he rebranded himself as Douglas Sirk and began to rebuild his career with Hitler's Madman (1943), a worthy attempt to alert US audiences to Nazi barbarity by re-enacting the reprisal massacre that occurred in the Czech town of Lidice following the assassination of acting Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in June 1942.

This would be Sirk's only film about the war for 15 years, however, as he proved himself to be a jack of all directorial trades and a master of the opulent melodrama. But in 1958, with his sight failing and his tenure at Universal Studios looking increasingly uncertain, he decided to go home to make A Time to Love and a Time to Die, which followed disillusioned Wehrmacht trooper John Gavin on a long-overdue furlough after two years of fighting a losing battle against the Red Army. Crushed to discover that his parents' home has been levelled in an air raid, Gavin becomes enamoured of doctor's daughter Liselotte Pulver, who provides a haven away from the dismaying discovery that college tutor Erich Maria Remarque has been reduced to living in a hovel (where he shelters Jewish refugees) and that classmate Thayer David is now an important Nazi henchman, who throws all-night orgies for sadistic concentration camp chief, Kurt Meisel.

A Time to Love and a Time to Die

Sirk's motives for returning to Berlin seem as scrambled as those for his flight 21 years earlier. The Russian Front setting of Remarque's source novel clearly had a personal significance, as Klaus Detlef Sierck (the son who had acted in several pro-Party pictures) had been killed in the Ukraine in 1944. However, it was never entirely certain whether Orin Jannings's screenplay was a plea for the victors to understand the suffering endured by the vanquished during the last days of the conflict or whether the killing of the Good German by a vengeful Communist guerilla was intended to be Cold War propaganda.

Regardless of its objectives, this touching study of the brevity of happiness was hailed as a masterpiece by Jean-Luc Godard in an effusive Cahiers du Cinéma review that launched the Sirkian cult that still attracts copious devotees. However, German audiences deeply resented a fugitive recreating their misery, while the film was banned in both Israel and the Soviet Union. It was somewhat fitting, therefore, that when Sirk quit the States in 1959, he settled in Switzerland - which had, of course, remained neutral during the war.

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