Letter from an Unknown Woman

Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948, USA, 86 minutes)*
* 35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation.

The second in a pair of SummerScape films exploring the Viennese culture that shaped the young Korngold, Letter from an Unknown Woman, based on the Stefan Zweig novella, is one of Hollywood’s greatest romantic melodramas. The German expatriate director Max Ophuls injects a remarkable degree of sophistication and nuance into his reconstruction of a lost fin-de-siècle world.