Letter from an Unknown Woman

After one of the most tragic romantic openings in all movie history ("By the time you finish reading this letter I'll be dead"), this develops into a marvellously bittersweet tale. It's hauntingly played by winsome Joan Fontaine and caddishly handsome Louis Jourdan, and brilliantly and economically dramatised from Stefan Zweig's novel by émigré director Max Ophüls, who delivers that rare beast, a Hollywood art movie. For Ophüls, style was everything, but here the Zweig story harnesses his Viennese sensibility to a very real tale of an unrequited love so painful it tears at your heartstrings. It's very Viennese and very wonderful.