Watch Letter from an Unknown Woman For Free

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Joan Fontaine and her husband William Dozier produced this film which contains a classic performance for Fontaine. In it she plays a woman who sees a lot more in the character of the man of her dreams than he really possesses. The object of her affection is Louis Jourdan, a womanizing concert pianist who when the film opens up is about to flee the scene rather than face an irate husband in a duel. Just as he's ready to take it on the lam, Jourdan receives a Letter From An Unknown Woman, one of many he's known in his life. He reads and the story in flashback begins.Like in her performance in The Constant Nymph Joan starts her performance as a child. When and widowed mother Mady Christians were living in Vienna, Jourdan was learning his craft and the sound of his playing gave her romantic fantasies.Later on when they meet as an adult they do have a brief affair which leaves her with child. True to his nature he leaves her and pursues his career and his romantic avocations. She was barely a blip on his radar.During the course of Fontaine's off screen narration of her letter, the tragedy of her life unfolds and the causes are a combination of her romantic fantasies and his lack of character. I can't say more but the end is truly heartbreaking.Letter From An Unknown Woman was a nice and truly original idea. It starts slowly, but you really get drawn into the story by Fontaine's off screen narration and on screen performance. Jourdan too is fascinating as a man who is less than the sum of his parts.A really great choice of roles for Joan Fontaine.

This is one of those somewhat atmospheric romances that are based on just enough actual story and a fine enough depiction of the human mind that it just might interest the male viewer, in spite of the obviously feminine traits at work in this genre. Joan Fontaine, as good as ever in this role, symbolizes through her character the softer, more dependent aspect of the female entity. She's very sweet, cute, extremely discreet, almost ...'invisible' (*wink*wink*). Jourdain plays his role just about right as well, and it is very clearly established the relation between these two lead characters, and in their own right individually the side of the male and female avatars symbolized.All in all this is a film that holds up nicely for about the whole film; while it never really involves the viewer in a terribly emotional state, and there is a bit that is to be desired in the intensity as this film fairly flatly delivers the scenes from the original book. And if any part of the film stands for that criticism, it would be the very ending, something of a flat shortcoming, that leaves the viewer a little bit hungry for more, for something else; for a more expressive depiction of the ultimate moment of narrative.

Max Ophüls' film, Letter from an Unknown Woman, is tragic love story about a woman who becomes completely enchanted by her neighbor. Set in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, the film encompasses the true culture and spirit going on in the city during this time. Although it ends in tragedy for all parties, one cannot ignore the undertones that speak to love and its consequences. While Ophüls' film may be old, I believe it is a timeless work of art that many people can still relate to their own lives. It begins when a man named Stephan Brand moves into his new house. He is a wonderful concert pianist that has an affinity for women, many different women. Lisa Berndle is his young naive neighbor who, after seeing his furniture being moved in, becomes immediately intrigued. From this point on her character is frequently portrayed making all attempts possible to hear Stephan's beautiful melodies floating from his piano into her apartment. Soon however Lisa's mother finds a man who she decides to marry, and the family is going to move to a new city. While waiting for the train with her family, Lisa's infatuation gets the best of her, and in a moment she is on her way back to her old home. When back in Vienna Lisa finds a job and makes daily attempts to get a glimpse of her secret love. When she finally manages to grab Stephan's attention, he manages to charm her even more, and that night they go out on a date. After a romantic dinner and night in the Vienna amusement park, they return to his apartment together and conceive a son. The following day, Stephan finds her working at the dress shop and asks to speak to her when she finishes work. Lisa soon finds out that he is leaving for a concert, but he promises that he will return to her in two weeks. Because of her blinding love for Stephan she trusts his word, but to her dismay he never returns to her. Eventually she moves on with life, marrying a military officer who loves her, supports her, and even takes her son in treating him as he would his own. Stephan enters the story again when the couple attends a concert one night. Lisa notices Stephan quickly and feels the passion returning, but does not want to recognize it so she pretends to be ill hoping to get home before he sees her. Perhaps she knew that if they meet again she would not be able to control her feelings, but Stephan eyes her leaving and catches her before she does. Once back at home with her husband, she realizes she must go see Stephan one more time. When they are together it seems for a small amount of time that he remembers who she is, but after Stephan uses the same lines he did before, she realizes that he has forgotten her. Knowing that her love was not returned she leaves before he can return with the drink he had promised her. Only when he receives a letter does he realize that she had been carrying his son and had loved him her entire life. Lisa's husband is knocking on the door as the movie comes to a close looking for a duel to defend the honor of his late wife and her dead son. It is only when Stephan realizes the folly of his ways that Stephan chooses to accept his fate and join his family in death.Though terribly sad and ironic, this film shows the true power of love, whether it is reciprocated or not. Lisa lived her whole life for Stephan, and in the end lost everything because of it. Stephan on the other hand never realized what he had in her until it was gone. After learning what he had done, he must have found that there was no reason to live any longer. Finally, the soldier who truly loved Lisa also realized that his love would never be enough, losing his wife to another man and ultimately to a terrible disease. Ophüls' film is a wonderful love story that illuminates the delights and perils that true love often contains.

I guess Mr. Zweig had not read psychoanalyst Darian Leader's book "Why do women write more letters than they post?" when he put his pen down; or maybe, despite the different time zone he did and decided to invert and take things a bit too literally. To make things as concise as possible, what is one of the arguments of the book, is that women question the addressee more than men do, and something cannot be put down in a woman's love letter, that is why what the title says happens.Mr. Zweig opts for the grand gesture of having one woman writing arguably just one letter in her life and sending it despite all odds; it seems that in her case nothing is lacking, even if her obsession with her object of love has significantly broken down. Most of the viewers already know how the story goes, yet let's take a step back.In a nutshell, what we see on screen is the narrative of a life-long infatuation with a man from a woman on the brink of death: she tells the story of her life as seen from early womanhood to early middle age and as seen through her encounters with her at first neighbor and finally clueless stranger with whom she is totally in love and with no interruption, even though he does not recognize her and even though she has his child.This pure 19th century gazette schlock is nevertheless pursued by Ophuls with undiminished gusto, finesse as if wrenching up all embellishment and turn of rondo and waltz to make the film into some kind of march with head up into deadly melodrama; he gives this second rate story its glorious second fate on screen.I will be a bit more precise: I find Mr. Zweig an unbearable bore; to play it Viennese-style he knows not what sostenuto and what legato is: all comes flat in his hand, if one has read some of his books, with all the humanist alibi already cracking after WWI.What I mean by this is that we are only once involved actively and empathetically in the film, and that happens when Lisa for once (and for all) staggers into the truth that the great pianist she has always loved not only does not remember her, but is an almost senile Don Juan babbling the same old story from woman to woman, from one nightly routine to the next. And here we may admire the team work shining through: Fontaine passes a glimpse of pity and despair through the recognition of what Stefan really is, that is pity for him and a despairing self-esteem for her; Jourdan glides into his world-worn gags, and although he seems to me somewhat anxious throughout the film, he delivers a performance mixing up burdensome repetition and - what is truly great - making visible through his slightly lecherous character pity and terror.I am not so sure this stands for Fontaine; each time we see her older what strikes us is that her appearance is conceived in terms of visual metamorphosis, that is regarding age and lighting. Although there is a grand design in the conception, something is amiss when this steals the scene. It is also a case of involuntary irony when the male leader is the stealer as I think Louis Jourdan is and is supposed to be actually when you think of it, but maybe this is the crux of the matter: it is as if Mr. Zweig has stepped into the time when Don Juan cannot make his mechanisms go on, he suffers from repression, entering the Freudian era, courtesy of Mr. Zweig's friend Sigmund, that is why - as if the roles between old man and old world woman were inverted - his character is the one with the overflow of affected narcissism.All this may be great, but we do not have a book called "Zweig and his time", what we have is the definitive book on let's say what Vienna was about,"Hofmannsthal and his time" which presents us the extra spritzy operatic and far more complex ironies Mr. Zweig being a humanist/melodramatist lacks. If one has seen, say, "La Ronde" by the same Ophuls, after Schnitzler's (another Viennese) work, will recognize what the Viennese hell we are talking about the director and his actors simply being spontaneously tuned to such material.