User Reviews

This overblown romance prefigures such Hollywood melodramas as WRITTEN ON THE WIND, but, like Douglas Sirk's tale of life among the oil aristocracy, is redeemed by technique, in this case Ophuls' spirited use of moving camera.

Everyone in the cast chews the curtains with appetite, particularly Isa Miranda as Gaby, the neurasthenic movie star who, following one of her many collapses in the course of the film, re-experiences the key event of her life, an unhappy love affair with married magnate Leonardo which led to the accidental death of his invalid wife, and Gaby's subsequent guilty breakdown.

Nobody tracked or craned the camera with more flair than Ophuls, and he uses both techniques expertly in this film, often, it seems, for no motive more weighty than simple glee at his expertise. An insignificant conversation between Gaby in a rowboat on a sun-lit lake and Leonardo driving his convertible along the bank is elaborately staged as two long tracking shots, with Ophuls intercutting between them.

Similar flair marks the death of wheelchair-bound Alma, her shadow racing ahead of her along the floor as she pushes her chair to the head of the stairs, then teeters and falls. Other sequences are too spasmodic, in particular those at the film studio, with Gaby's cliché cigar-chewing agent negotiating a new contract with the equally stock studio head, and,later, Leonardo facing a hostile board that attacks him for neglect of the company.

Miranda is at her febrile worst in this film, and it demands considerable suspension of disbelief to accept as her married lover the overweight and stolid Memo Benassi, whose primary acting technique is to stare into the middle distance and fire up another cigarette. But any enthusiast for Ophuls' fluid camera will find the film a delight.

This is a stunning early sound film from Max Ophuls which deservedly won a 'technical' award at Venice. It's difficult to imagine that old Awesome did not include this in the dozens of films he watched before making Kane because Ophuls uses, some seven years earlier, many of the techniques, not least overlapping Sound, that crystallised in Kane. The plot verges on the melodramatic but the Style is something else; flashbacks within flashbacks, lush tracking shots, montages, dissolves, everything in fact from what those academics love to call the 'grammar' of film making is present and correct. A film in 1934 that begins with a wipe of the label on a 78 rpm record and ends on a static shot of the face of the heroine on a poster has to be out of the right bottle and this is vintage. Dix sur dix going away.

After the Action Horror thrills of Blind Woman's Curse (1970-also reviewed) I decided to check for other DVDs/ Blu-Ray's that I've been meaning to watch. Picking up this DVD a few years ago around Christmas,I felt it was time to play Gaby's record.

View on the film:

For their 100th presentation, Masters Of Cinema unveil a great transfer, with the pristine soundtrack and smooth print being backed by informative, detailed extras.

Laying on the cold steel hospital operating table comfortably numb after attempting to end her life,Isa Miranda gives an exquisite performance,in what was then only her third credit,as Gabby, whose current starry eye status as a celebrity is cracked by Miranda with subtle facial expressions and brittle body language, which perfectly captures the grinding down of optimism from Gabby's marked with deaths life.

Feeling a magnetic desire towards siren Gabby, Memo Benassi gives a great performance as Leonardo, whose passions for Gabby triggers the accidental death of his wife, which reverberates over the event looming over Gabby's life like a ghost.

Twirling from a record playing the last notes of Gabby's life, to the studio head, agents attempting to figure out how to keep their biggest star comfortably numb in order to be in working condition for the next big money making project, co-writer (with Curt Alexander & Hans Wilhelm) / directing auteur Max Ophuls closely works with cinematographer Ubaldo Arata and editor Ferdinando Maria Poggioli to compose poetry in motion across Gabby's life.

Sailing through the haze of Gabby under anesthetic towards an extended flashback, Ophuls brings into focus an immaculate, ultra-stylised, doom-laden Melodrama atmosphere, via long tracking shots towards Gabby's school days, which lands on a tragic romance which seeps across the rest of Gabby's life via mesmerizing superimpositions, gliding distorted shots, (reflecting the distortion of Gabby's image) stark, beautiful close-ups, and long panning shots down the shadows of death surrounding Gabby.

Adapting Salvatore Gotta's novel, the writers unveil a silky character study Melodrama, (a genre which Ophuls would explore across his credits) where the fragmented flashbacks and flashbacks within flashback superbly build a avalanche of tragedy which gradually builds up until the mass of heart break and death lands on Gabby.

One of the most lastingly elegant and piercing films of its era, Max Ophuls' La signora di tutti fully realizes the tragically ironic paradox implicit in its title, that if the signora belongs to all, she belongs to no one, least of all to herself. Isa Miranda, perfectly embodying the character's journey from exploited innocence to doomed fatalism, plays Gaby, early in the film expelled from school after a scandal where a professor killed himself over her (we don't see the professor, and it seems clear that she did little or nothing to encourage him, the first in the film's succession of doomed romantic imbalances). She's invited to a party by a young man, Roberto, who might be the potential love of her life, all the more so after his disabled mother also becomes fond of her, and then largely dependent on her. But Roberto's financier father also falls for her, messing things up, leading to family tragedy and his financial ruin; she flees and eventually becomes a movie star, without of course finding the happiness to match the image. Roberto briefly reenters her life and she starts to think there may be a way back for them, but it turns out he's married her estranged sister instead; however, he tells her, he'll still see her, onscreen in her latest film, once it reaches them. Of course, despite Ophuls' satirical approach to the film industry's calculations and mercantilism, his feeling for the medium is peerless, alert to the entire visual possibilities of the narrative space, deeply attuned to emotional fragility and longing. But even as this lends the film a sense of expansive possibility, there's a persistent offsetting gravity, a sense that nothing can ever be entirely consigned to the past. In this regard too, Gaby's allure is that of cinema itself, in a film that speaks deeply to its moment, and barely any less to our own.