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"Io sono la signora di tutti, ma mia anima piange per te..." Max Ophüls in Italy, a dream-factory fable with a suicidal Cinderella sprawled on the bedroom floor. As studio moguls chew cigars and fret over losing their prized commodity, the movie star under surgical ether (Isa Miranda) recalls a life of cursed beauty. "Una ragazza pericolosa," like Wedekind's Lulu helplessly so, the colonel's daughter kicked out of the chorus following an infatuated professor's death. Shame is the mark pulling her down and galas and operas are the bedazzlements lifting her up, she twirls with a society beau (Friedrich Benfer) through a little galaxy of party streamers. His mother is an ailing countess (Tatyana Pavlova), his father a tycoon with a roving eye (Memo Benassi), one ends at the bottom of the spiral staircase and the other ruined before the board of directors. "Not things one can talk about in a microphone," snaps the agent hoping for a fluffy biography. Cukor's What Price Hollywood? and Stahl's Only Yesterday are adjacent, the dissipation of the affair is a vast empty mansion surely remembered by Welles. Movement as joy (off to the ball, the heroine sprints until she faces a mirror), movement as desperation (rushing trains overlapped for a couple's futile escape), movement as a virtuoso's joke (tracking shots intercut in a chat between limousine and rowboat). At the still center the doll-like void of Miranda, anticipating Lola Montès herself. A touch of La Chienne for the count's last look at his beloved's name in lights, a glimpse into the illusion machine—the press churning out glamour posters grinds to a halt in tandem with the camera. Her farewell note has the Ophüls lament, "troppo tardi." Cinematography by Ubaldo Arata. With Nelly Corradi, Franco Coop, and Lamberto Picasso. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |