OT LONG ago, I had the misfortune of seeing Max Ophüls’ at Metrograph with an audience mostly made up of insufferable cine-bros, who proceeded to laugh openly and repeatedly at the film from its very first line of dialogue. The weirdest thing about this reaction is how it can occur at a screening of just about any old movie, no matter its reputation. I’ve sat among downtown audiences—mostly young, white, and male, and likely attendees or graduates, as I admittedly am, of the Tisch School of the Arts—who chortled with snide irreverence at works as disparate as Alfred Hitchcock’s , Douglas Sirk’s , and Roman Polanski’s . But something about the reaction towards vexed me more than it has on past occasions. Maybe it was because this 1949 noir melodrama, centered around a California homemaker (Joan Bennett) who resorts to desperate measures to cover up, and continue to inspire in many. Today it seems to exist only as a brief footnote in the exquisite and highly vaunted career of its German-born director, or else as the movie whose source material, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s 1947 novel , also inspired the 2001 thriller .
