Amazon.com essential video
Considered by many critics to be Max Ophüls's finest work,
The Earrings of Madame de... is an exquisitely sculpted romance masterpiece of surface manners, social graces, and meaningless gestures passed off as honor. Danielle Darrieux is the unnamed Madame, the spoiled wife of Charles Boyer, who is the epitome of the confident, cultured gentleman. Trapped by mutual consent in a loveless marriage, she occupies her days spending herself into debt and her evenings flirting with silly young suitors, while her husband dallies with his mistress. The veil of respectability that protects this perfect relationship of lies and indulgence is torn away by a pair of earrings she secretly sells to cover debts and her husband buys back for his mistress. In a circularity so loved by Ophüls, the jewels travel back to Madame as a present from a suitor (a suave and serious Vittorio De Sica) too serious to be dismissed by her husband. Ophüls is rather cool toward these characters, as if he pities their shallow façades. Madame is less overwhelmed by passion than enthralled by the idea of love: it's only in the absence of her attentive lover that her perfect comportment collapses, while her husband is propelled into action more by social expectation than jealousy. Ophüls's camera dances through the decor while watching the doomed game play out at a distance, capturing a culture of courtly manners petrified into meaningless ritual.
--Sean Axmaker
