Seamless, frictionless and pretty much flawless, Max Ophüls’s 1950 movie version of Arthur Schnitzler’s racy 1900 play is rereleased as part of a campaign to save London’s Curzon Mayfair cinema; it takes its audience on a dizzying swirl, like a waltz, or a champagne-induced headspin.
The film is an ensemble or portmanteau movie set in early-20th-century Vienna, composed of 10 scenes and 10 couples, connected in a daisy chain of sex. A bighearted streetwalker has sex (for nothing) with a soldier who then dates a shopgirl, who then gets a job as chambermaid and is seduced by her employer’s grownup son, who then has an affair with a married woman, and so on, up the social class – until a bleary count is confronted by the prostitute we saw at the beginning, and is assailed by the strange sense that he has seen her somewhere before. And so he has, in a way; they are all connected, he has perhaps had an encounter with her before, or someone like her, and she has met someone like him. They are all linked in a dance of cynicism and secrecy. (I can’t help thinking of the 1920s song: “I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales.”)
