The daughter of a Japanese nobleman sells herself as a geisha in order to save her family from poverty and dishonour when her father dies leaving debts. She meets and falls in love with a Russian naval officer, but their romance is threatened by the love of a jealous servant, and by the espionage mission that the officer has been assigned to.

Yoshiwara.1937.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 30 min
Size: 	1.44 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	696x566 ~> 754x566
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.212
Audio
#1:  	French 1.0ch AC-3 @ 256 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/43BF8DEDAF77AB6/Yoshiwara.1937.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Max Ophüls – Yoshiwara (1937) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN is set in Vienna at the turn of the century, an era Ophüls loved and had used in LA RONDE and LIEBELEI. Joan Fontaine gives a moving, heartfelt performance as Lisa Berndl, a romantic young woman who falls in love with the handsome concert pianist Stephan Brandt (Louis Jourdan).

After a brief affair, which she takes for love, not seeing that he is just a philanderer, he leaves for a concert in Italy and never returns to the now-pregnant Lisa. She bears the child herself and later enters into a stable marriage, although one lacking the passion and love she still feels for Stephan. Ten years later, when he returns to Vienna, Lisa attempts, at the risk of her marriage, to see if he loves, or even remembers her. Fontaine and Jourdan perfectly project the feelings of a woman in love and a man too selfish to notice or care.

Written by Howard Koch, the co-author of CASABLANCA, from a novel by Stephan Zweig, LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN is generally described as a “woman’s picture” because of its theme of unrequited love. But this somewhat pejorative description hides what in acting, writing, camera work, atmosphere and emotion is not just one of Max Ophüls’ crowning achievements, but one the finest examples of how all elements needed to make a great film are brought together. (Rotten Tomatoes)

Letter from an unknown woman - Max Ophuls (1948).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 27mn
Size: 	1.83 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 754 Kbps
BPP: 	0.260
Audio
#1:  	English 1.0ch FLAC

https://nitro.download/view/AF260392F40518C/Letter_from_an_unknown_woman_-_Max_Ophuls_(1948).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/95D5BC0A02E1CCA/Letter_from_an_unknown_woman_-_Max_Ophuls_(1948)_-_eng_2.srt

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, French

The post Max Ophüls – Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
A Viennese opera house, early in the century. In attendance are lieutenants Kaiser and Lobheimer. Two young ladies on the balcony, Mizzi and Christine, drop their opera glasses, hitting one of the officers. The Baron von Eggersdorff arrives in his box. Lobheimer leaves early for his tryst with the Baron’s wife. The Baron soon arrives home, in a suspicious mood. Lobheimer rejoins Kaiser in a café with the two girls. Lobheimer soon falls for Christine… The Baroness wonders why her lover has been absent for so long; the two now part for good. But the Baron learns the secret and discovers that a key still in his wife’s possession opens the lieutenant’s door. He challenges Lobheimer to a duel…

Liebelei - Max Ophuels (1933) (KG custom).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 26mn
Size: 	2.40 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	640x576 ~> 683x576
Aspect ratio:  	1.186
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 397 Kbps
BPP: 	0.384
Audio
#1:  	German 1.0ch AC-3 @ 320 Kbps (KG custom audio)
#2:  	German 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 Kbps (DVD Filmmuseum audio)

https://nitro.download/view/7A2A230834B8830/Liebelei_-_Max_Ophuels_(1933)_(KG_custom).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/DDE3B31479AE547/Liebelei.1933.KG.custom.DVD.24fps.ENG.14.srt

https://fikper.com/5lzo11u2xg/Liebelei_-_Max_Ophuels_(1933)_(KG_custom).mkv
https://fikper.com/llTtUacPNO/Liebelei.1933.KG.custom.DVD.24fps.ENG.14.srt

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

The post Max Ophüls – Liebelei (1933) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A young salesman may inherit a wine-estate on one condition: he can’t drink a drop of alcohol for at least a month.

Lachende Erben.1933.BDRip-AVC msltel.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 15 min
Size: 	2.14 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	790x576 
Aspect ratio:  	1.372
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 858 kb/s
BPP: 	0.353
Audio
#1:  	German 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/C06782D31D07932/Lachende_Erben.1933.BDRip-AVC_msltel.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English, Russian

The post Max Ophüls – Lachende Erben AKA The Merry Heirs (1933) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
The story of a once-respectable woman who re-encounters her first love, now a successful doctor. Reduced to nude-dancing in a sleazy dive, with a son to support, Evelyne (Edwige Feuillère) borrows money at an outrageous interest rate in order to create a facade of respectability–and, it goes without saying, Georges falls in love with her all over again. But how can Evelyne maintain her bourgeois value and save son and “father” from the consequences of her fall?

2.06GB | 1h 22m | 790×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/6DB16E81D979F36/Sans_lendemain_(There’s_No_Tomorrow)_(1939)_–_Max_Ophuls.mkv
or
https://nitro.download/view/7D3D4CF426F5AC2/Sans_lendemain_(There’s_No_Tomorrow)_(1939)_–_Max_Ophuls.part1.rar
https://nitro.download/view/BE6C72A5A2560CD/Sans_lendemain_(There’s_No_Tomorrow)_(1939)_–_Max_Ophuls.part2.rar
https://nitro.download/view/19853D398935F85/Sans_lendemain_(There’s_No_Tomorrow)_(1939)_–_Max_Ophuls.part3.rar

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, French (muxed)

The post Max Ophüls – Sans lendemain AKA There’s No Tomorrow AKA Without Tomorrow (1939) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Yoshiwara (1937)

Quote:
The film is set in Yoshiwara, the red-light district of Tokyo, in the nineteenth century. It depicts a love triangle between a high-class prostitute, a Russian naval officer and a rickshaw man.

Quote:
The period of exile between Max Ophuls’ departure from Germany after the rise of Hitler and his flight to America after the fall of France remains the most neglected portion of his career. Of the nine films he directed, mainly in France, during those seven years, only one (La Signora di Tutti [1934]) is at all well known; one (On a Vole un Homme [1933]) is lost; and opportunities to see the remainder are largely confined to the occasional touring retrospective. The neglect of Yoshiwara (1937) is therefore not unique. It is neither the most perfect of Ophuls’ prewar French films (a title which would probably be claimed by the rather academic brilliance of Sans Lendemain [1939]) nor the most complex (I would choose Werther [1938], a masterly perversion of Goethe’s novel which substantially improves on the self-indulgent romanticism of its literary source). But it is certainly the most underrated, not least by Ophuls himself, who dismissed it in interviews’; while most of those critics who have not ignored it have despised it.

Typically the French line has been kinder than the Anglo-American: Lorenzo Codelli’s account in Positif is the only really enthusiastic (albeit brief) recent discussion of the film that I have come across. Claude Beylie quotes several favourable extracts from the French reviewers of 1937; while acknowledging that “today’s” audiences (today being 1963) find it dated, he extends qualified praise to Ophuls’ efforts to imbue a “grotesque” scenario with “a kind of half-decorative, half-sentimental poetry”. Richard Roud, on the other hand, finds it “grotesque” without qualification, while Susan White, in her book-length study of the director’s work, relegates it to a footnote, condemns it for “pasteboard Japonism”, and describes it as “a dime-store Mizoguchi”.

Yoshiwara certainly looks more like a Mizoguchi than almost any other European film I could name, and its premise–a woman descends into prostitution for the sake of a male friend or relative–is identical to that of The Downfall of Osen (1934). If Ophuls in 1937 could hardly have been familiar with an oeuvre which was to remain almost unknown in the West until the fifties, the recurrence in Yoshiwara of common Japanese plot motifs suggests at least a reasonable acquaintance with certain fundamental assumptions of Japanese culture. As for “pasteboard Japonism”, art directors Leon and Andre Barsacq were both distinguished professionals whose careers between them encompassed such richly atmospheric and meticulously detailed films as L’Argent (1928, Marcel L’Herbier), La Marseillaise (1938, Jean Renoir) and Les Enfants du Paradis (1945, Marcel Carne). If their sets for Yoshiwara look a little fake, then it may be wisest to ascribe that to budgetary considerations. On the other hand, it may have been a deliberate stylistic choice, in which case one may, as Lorenzo Codelli does, admire the Sternbergian qualities of “an Orient made of cardboard and mysterious shadows.” Certainly to dismiss it for lack of realism is beside the point, and while I think that Ophuls’ Japan is a rather more complex and plausible society than most Western representations of the Orient, I am no more concerned with its historical verisimilitude than I would be with that of his Vienna, Anno 1900, in an account of La Ronde (1950).

2.71GB | 1h 31m | 1920×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/0F565F9379C7511/Baks.1974.VHSRip.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/AD17BF0EB55AE6D/Yoshiwara.1937.1080p.Web-DL.KG.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Max Ophüls – Yoshiwara (1937) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
When the opening titles credit a film as adapted from a short story in the Woman s Home Journal, you know you re onto a good thing. The Reckless Moment doesn t disappoint. Max Ophuls last American film is a women s picture in the grand tradition of Mildred Pierce (1945) – dark edged and melodramatic, and dripping with moral ambiguities.

Like Mildred, Lucia Harper (Bennett) is a practical, determined housewife attempting to hold her family together against ever-increasing odds. When her wayward teenage daughter accidentally murders her crooked older lover in the boathouse, Lucia hides the body and attempts to go on with her life. But trouble arrives in the form of Donnelly (Mason), an emotionally vulnerable Irish mobster sent by his superior, the mysterious Nagle, to blackmail the Harper family to the tune of $5000. But while Lucia scrambles to raise the money in her husband s absence, Donnelly begins to develop powerful feelings for his intended victim.

The power of The Reckless Moment lies in a subtle subversion of established cliché. The plot is straightforward, even predictable, and at first glance, the characters seem much the same: the straight-laced mother, the selfish, petulant daughter and her sleaze ball boyfriend, the scrappy teenage son and grizzled grandfather, the sassy black maid with a heart of gold. But gradually our perceptions begin to shift, as hidden depths are revealed through the characters interactions with one another. Donnelly is introduced and immediately feels out of place. He s placid, reasonable, completely unthreatening, polite and accommodating to Lucia and her family, far from the typical Hollywood gangster. And through her contact with him, another side of Lucia is revealed, the part of her that feels stymied by obligation, unable to step outside the norm for fear of being questioned. Her family is her pride and joy but also her cage. There s a sense of grim-faced compulsion in the way she deals with them, giving her all to protect them but resenting their hold over her.

Lucia and Donnelly s relationship never develops beyond the platonic. In his introduction, Todd Haynes discusses how the filmmakers took their lead from Brief Encounter (1945), placing emphasis on passionate restraint over torrid bursts of emotion. And it s an odd relationship. We get the feeling Lucia is quite a bit older than Donnelly, more experienced and capable, a mother figure as much as a lust object. While her feelings for him are born out of gratitude and remorse rather than desire, her dedication to her absentee husband is never called into question.

It is only at the end that Lucia s icy mask begins to crack, and here Ophuls pulls off his final act of subversion. After doggedly resisting all attempts at support, whether from her family members or from Donnelly himself, Lucia finally accepts the assistance of the black maid Sybil, whose domestic servility is swept away as she assumes the dominant role, watching over Lucia in her hour of need. It s a fitting end to a strange but moving film, small but perfectly formed, and a welcome rediscovery on DVD.

1.75GB | 1 h 22 min | 800×576 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/DE41074AFE8E89B/Max_Ophuls_-_(1949)_The_Reckless_Moment.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Max Ophüls – The Reckless Moment (1949) first appeared on Cinema of the World.