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Critics Consensus: Golden Age Hollywood romance doesn't get much better than Letter From an Unknown Woman, a powerful tale of doomed love.
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Critic Consensus: Golden Age Hollywood romance doesn't get much better than Letter From an Unknown Woman, a powerful tale of doomed love.
All Critics (22) | Top Critics (4) | Fresh (22) | Rotten (0) | DVD (2)
Of all the cinema's fables of doomed love, none is more piercing than this.
A breathtaking, bitter, exquisitely orchestrated exploration of love and selfishness by Max Ophuls.
Its layers of interpretation and emotional meaning, combined with its impeccable style, yield an endlessly re-watchable film that changes, as film critic Molly Haskell observes, with time and with you.
...a women's picture that nonetheless turns on male chauvinism.
[Max] Ophuls' first personal project in Hollywood and he injects this exquisitely stylish romantic melodrama with his continental sensibility.
A moving weepie woman's picture.
A weepie like they don't make them like anymore.
One of Hollywood's, and cinema's, grandest and most emotionally satisfying tales of unrequited love and self-sacrifice.
One of the greatest achievements in American film.
Remarkable romantic drama.
Does the job of the perfect melodrama and moves the audience to tears.
Heartbreaking.
A man receives a letter from a woman he's known, wooed, seduced ... and forgotten. A classic Hollywood melodrama set in romantic old Vienna and handled deftly by director Max Ophuls, who keeps the usual violin chorus down to a discreet tone, allowing for a full feeling of how romance blossoms and then is carried with one. A heady potion for this chick flick about sacrifice, yearning and denial that's as close to fine wine as you'll get. Joan Fontaine and Louis Jordan embody the mood wonderfully.
Super Reviewer
One of the most heartwrenching melodramas I've seen. I actually had to contain myself from shedding tears, witnessing the passion, intensity and beauty it exudes.
Very sad, literally could not tear myself away from this one.
A young girl's infatuation with a womanizing concert pianist ends in tragedy. What I like best about this elegant weepie is the way that it gently subverts Fontaine's typical screen persona. At first glance, her character is every bit as mousy and vulnerable as usual, but behind this façade lies a remarkably strong-minded young woman; she knows what she wants and - flouting all respectability, and against her own better judgement - she sets out to get it. Although the film chooses not to dwell on the ensuing scandals, on more than one occasion she sacrifices her good name and social standing for the man she loves. I also like the way that Ophüls credits us with intelligence enough to draw certain parallels for ourselves, without spoon-feeding. A good example of this would be the scene where Fontaine says goodbye to her son at the railway station; many lesser directors would have inserted a flashback to her abandonment by Louis Jourdan at this point, or at the very least a snippet of dialogue from that earlier scene.
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