Madame de...

The respected film critic Andrew Sarris called this ‘the most perfect film ever made’ and, on a purely visual level, I’d agree with him.From its first moment this is a deliriously sensual experience, Max Ophüls’s ever-roving camera swooping and sliding, prowling round corners, impudently breaking through walls, following the characters along corridors and streets, or circling them at a sumptuous ball in a seemingly endless dance ...The cinema of Ophüls is a resolutely pictorial one, hinting at emotion through visual clues and nuances. Madame De... is one of his most subtly bittersweet films, with impeccable Charles Boyer as a brisk, peremptory but not unkind army general, and sad-faced Danielle Darrieux {who died in 2017 aged 100} as his restless wife, in a soured marriage in which both appear to have lost the intimacy they presumably once had. They sleep in separate beds, communicating ~ in a superb scene early in the film ~ from one room to another. Ophüls’s sense of space is astonishing.Italian director and occasional actor Vittorio de Sica plays the man who falls for the errant Darrieux, and the whole tale revolves {le mot juste!} around an innocent pair of expensive earrings.It’s a French film in love with Vienna. It’s also a masterpiece. The ending is only slightly ambiguous, adding to the film’s piquancy.I could happily watch it with the sound off, such is its visual brilliance.A masterpiece.

A masterpiece restored to it's former glory. BFI has once again produced a worthy collectors edition of this masterpiece.I guess some still prefer DVD over BluRay so hence the dual pack.The BD was stunning, soundwise excellent, extras very good and a well produced booklet.Excellent.Very strongly recommended.

One of the world's greatest films.

Being a relentlessly self-hating, misanthropic, pith-poor, maniacally depressed, sick-headed, societal reject isn’t always the peaches & scream, dream team the titty-twisting existentialists extemporize so ardently about; sometimes, acting robotically upon the good doctor’s orders; I must regularly ingest synaptic inhibitors, which allow me to endure morose, monochrome grot with nary a timorous flash of decent fanny, or micro-droplet of gratuitous violence! Oh! The terrible things one must endure to maintain a so tenuously tottering veneer of ‘normality’. According to the hellaciously hyperbolic, hucksterist ululations of one Andrew Harris, this cinematic cove expounds optimistically that ‘Madame de...’ is ‘The Greatest Film of All time’??? What an absolute bilious, back-wiping bosh-merchant!!! That vertiginous honour, goodly sir Harris, quite clearly resides with Bob Clark’s continually low-balled, zombie thespian fun-magnet, ‘Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things’, and these are not merely the spuriously subjective ruminations of a pitifully penurious mental defective....ah! yes, to be fair, perhaps, yes, it is, sadly, IT IS just that...sorry...nothing to see here...

This movie is on the BFI list of the best movies of all time and, having watched it , I can understand why. A classic film.