La Ronde (1950)
Directed by Max Ophüls
An all-knowing interlocutor guides us through a series of affairs in Vienna, 1900. A soldier meets an eager young lady of the evening. Later he has an affair with a young lady, who becomes a maid and does similarly with the young man of the house. The young man seduces a married woman. On and on, spinning on the gay carousel of life.
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What critics compared La Ronde to
The heavily improvised "Song to Song," which was originally called "Lawless" and then "Weightless," harks back to the Arthur Schnitzler play "La Ronde."
It's a gleefully randy romantic roundelay, in the tradition of Max Ophuls' serially sexual French comedy "La Ronde" (1950).
When their cheating comes out in the open, Larry goes to a strip club and inadvertently runs into Alice -- and on, and on, like a snide British version of La Ronde (1950).
In a time of timid projects and easy formulas, "The Red Violin'' has the kind of sweep and vision that we identify with elegant features from decades ago--films that followed a story thread from one character to another, such as "Tales of Manhattan'' or "La Ronde.''
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Smiles of a Summer Night is easily compared to a buoyant, agile movie like Max Ophuls' La Ronde (1950).
The movie would have worked better if it were structured more like Arthur Schnitzler's classic tale of love, "La Ronde," which is enjoying an adaptation currently on Broadway.
Born in Germany, Ophuls worked in five countries over the course of his 25-year career -- most successfully in the U.S. with Letter from an Unknown Woman and in France with La Ronde, Le Plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de... and his final film, Lola Montes.
It’s not unlike Arthur Schnitzler‘s La Ronde (1950) on speed, set in a tawdry Noir Los Angeles.
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Alluding perhaps to the opening movement of Max Ophuls's adaptation of Schnitzler's La ronde (last seen on stage with Kidman's butt as The Blue Room), Kubrick -- who admired Ophuls and imitated him in camera movement if not in movements of the soul -- has Domino invite Bill to "come inside with her," an attempted coupling that's disrupted when that damned cell phone rings again and Alice asks when Bill's coming home.
It's based on a play by Arthur Schnitzler, who also wrote the novel upon which Eyes Wide Shut is based.
The title suggests a dream, or "seeing with your eyes closed," and the film is based on "Dream Story" (or "Traumnovelle"), a 1926 novella by Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler ("La Ronde").
The black-and-white The Earrings of Madame de... is of a piece with its predecessors, La Ronde (1950) and Le Plaisir (1952), but most consider it the best of the three.
A side-by-side comparison of the ballroom sequences in Madame and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (based on a novel by Arthur Schnitzler, as was Ophüls’s 1950 film La Ronde) would be startling, especially in the resemblance between the slow-dancing suitors played by De Sica and Sky Dumont, “the Hungarian.”
Deliciously blending Sacha Guitry's The Pearls of the Crown and Ophüls's own La Ronde, this is just about as polished as European cinema gets.
In September 2008, Criterion released three Max Ophuls films simultaneously on DVD: “La ronde” (1950), “Le plaisir” (1952), and “The Earrings of Madame De...” (1953).
The Criterion Collection has released this and two other Ophuls films, Le Plaisir and The Earrings of Madame de... in gorgeous new black-and-white transfers.