Max Ophuls (1950)
At one point the street carousel has stopped and the Master of Ceremonies, played by Anton Walbrook, needs to do some repairs to get it started again. We get a double helping of the liaison taking place at this point – between a young man (Daniel Gélin) and a married woman (Danielle Darrieux) – before normal service resumes in La Ronde. In fact, this celebrated adaptation of the Schnitzler play is a slow-moving piece of machinery nearly throughout. I was expecting more rapid changing of partners and more social variety in the characters. Schnitzler’s idea that human beings behave in the same way between the sheets regardless of who they appear to be, in their outdoor clothes and personas, is weakened if the people don’t seem different. The fact that there’s a housemaid (Simone Simon) and a grisette (Odette Joyeux) involved in the action counts for little when nearly all the female cast seems to be out of the same social drawer. Simon and Joyeux, just as much as Darrieux, come across as classy women pretending not to be – the gilded smoothness of these three actresses blurs the differences between the women they’re interpreting. Late on in the film, when the poet (Jean-Louis Barrault) and the actress (Isa Miranda) slap each other on the face it’s a welcome sign of life. The poet is a caricature of self-styled all-talk genius but Barrault livens up proceedings: from this point on, La Ronde seems to move more quickly, even hurriedly, and the people on screen, although broadly drawn, also have more theatrical life. Isa Miranda, who has vocal depth and power and is physically imposing, eclipses the succession of perfectly calibrated, unthreatening diseuses who’ve preceded her. The other men – Gélin, Fernand Gravey (Darrieux’s husband), Serge Reggiani (a common soldier), Gérard Philipe (a more aristocratic one, with a sabre) – are all more distinctive than the women but Barrault is the only one who manages to break the unvarying rhythm which Max Ophuls imposes on the story.
The Master of Ceremonies narrator both anticipates Peter Ustinov’s ringmaster in Lola Montès and seems to function as the director’s representative on screen. (At one point, the MC takes a pair of scissors to a piece of film – I wasn’t sure whether this was meant to remind us that Ophuls was obliged to remove any evidence of sexual activity between the various couples.) Walbrook is agreeable company in the role but he too speaks (and occasionally sings) leisurely and the transitions from one pairing to another that he is required to introduce are wordily deliberate: my heart was sinking, after a couple of these, at the prospect of how long the whole thing was going to take (93 minutes). The only consolation is that the structure of La Ronde requires Simone Signoret, who disappears much too soon at the start, to return at the end. Playing a prostitute, she’s in a different class from the other actresses in more ways than one. As you would expect with this director, the Viennese mise-en-scène is elaborately beautiful and the well-known waltz music by Oscar Straus is perfectly apt. But the film, seen for the first time now, seems tepid compared with a sex farce like Smiles of a Summer Night. The aphrodisiac dinner in Tom Jones may have been inspired by the grisette‘s display of appetite in La Ronde but it’s also much funnier.
13 August 2012
