Skip to main content

LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, OPHULS

4/5 stars
TERRIFIC movie.  Louis Jourdaine and Joan Fontaine.  Joan falls in love with pianist Louis when she is 15.  She remains in love with him despite the fact that he forgets all about her.  She has his baby, raises the boy, marries, but when he returns--she falls madly in love with him again.  Goodbye son and husband.

She packs her boy off (tears streaming) to his school.  Both he and she sit briefly in a railroad car that has had typhus patient.  Boy dies.  Joan dies . . . but not before writing a letter to Louis explaining her love.

Movie ends with Louis heading off to a duel (which he will lose) with Joan's husband, though it seems unlikely he is aware that it is her husband.  He is, however, aware that by being so self-centered he threw away his one chance at true love.

Joan Fontaine was terrific.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin . . . finished

 Follows Sadie and Sam (Mazer) from childhood to mid-thirties when both are feeling old and a bit out of it in the gaming world.  Characters are well-rounded, develop throughout the novel in interesting way.  Plot is involved but sensible.  Not a single, "Oh, come on!" moment.  The book could have been faster paced. Odd, since the main topic is video games which are not for their speed of engagement and Gabrielle Zevin clearly knows her video games. Recommended by Michael Connelly in an interview.  He also has Bosch pick up the book in his novel, Resurrection Walk, as Bosch tails a possible witness to a crime as she moves through a bookstore. Sadie and Sam do not get together at the end, which is good.   Marx killed by homophobic nutcase who really wants to kill Sam, but Sam isn't there. Marx is father of Sadie's child. 

The Franchise Affair, Josephine Tey--opening pages

Blair, a lawyer in Milford, gets a strange call.  His practice is wills and similar--nothing criminal.  A woman tells him that Scotland Yard is accusing her of abduction and implores him to come out to help her, even if later on he passes the case to someone else.  The woman says she has called him because he is "her type," meaning respectable and conservative.  He agrees.