Books in French are on www.livres-cinema.info
Max Ophuls in the Hollywood Studios
by Lutz Bacher
(0 vote)Average rating:
| 0 | rating |  = We can do without |
| 0 | rating |  = Good book |
| 0 | rating |  = Excellent book |
| 0 | rating |  = Unique / a reference |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
Max Ophuls, who is considered one of the greatest film directors of all time, has long been seen as an “auteur”––the artist in complete control of his work. Lutz Bacher’s examination of his American career gives us a unique perspective on the workings of the Hollywood system and the struggle of a visionary to function within it. He thus establishes clear connections between the production contexts of Ophuls' American films and their idiosyncratic style.
Drawing on documents in many archives and on interviews with more than sixty of Ophuls' contemporaries, Bacher traces the European director's struggle to find a niche in the U.S. film industry. He describes how Ophuls ran the gamut from ghost writing to substitute directing, to a debilitating association with Preston Sturges and Howard Hughes, to making four films––Letter from an Unknown Woman and Caught among them––in thirty months, and then returning to Europe with a runaway production that was to have starred Greta Garbo. Throughout, Bacher demonstrates that Ophuls' bending of conventional Hollywood methods to his own will through compromise and subversion allowed him to achieve a style that was both uniquely American and a point of departure for his later work. A rare synthesis of production history, stylistic analysis, and biography, this book is essential reading for serious film scholars and fans of the director’s work.
About the Author:
Lutz Bacher teaches film and photography in the department of communications at Robert Morris College in Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Mobile Mise en Scene, the standard work on long-take camera movement.
Press Reviews:
Among the approximately 30 European film directors who sought sanctuary from Hitler by emigrating to Hollywood between 1933 and 1941, Ophuls is unique in significant ways, as Bachers excellent introduction makes clear. The very last of the lot to arrive in Hollywood in the fall of 1941, he had already made one new life in France; but as an active anti-Nazi, German-born and Jewish, he had compelling reason to flee the Vichy regime.
— Choice
See the publisher website: Rutgers University Press
See the complete filmography of Max Ophüls on the website: IMDB ...
> On a related topic:
The Cinema of Max Ophuls (1995)
Magisterial Vision and the Figure of Woman
Subject: Director > Max Ophüls
Letter from an Unknown Woman (2021)
Subject: One Film > Letter from an Unknown Woman
Decades Never Start on Time (2014)
A Richard Roud Anthology
by Richard Roud, Michael Temple and Karen Smolens
Subject: On Films > Movie magazines
City of Darkness, City of Light (2003)
Emigre Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939
Subject: History of Cinema
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1986)
Max Ophuls, Director
Dir. Virginia Wexman
Subject: One Film > Letter from an Unknown Woman
Everywhere an Oink Oink (2025)
An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood
by David Mamet
Subject: Director > David Mamet
Preston Sturges (2019)
The Last Years of Hollywood's First Writer-Director
by Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges
Subject: Director > Preston Sturges
Cecil B. Demille (2014)
The Art of the Hollywood Epic
by Cecilia DeMille Presley and Mark A. Vieira
Subject: Director > Cecil B. DeMille
Back
