Max Ophüls was a director both popular with audiences and greatly admired by other filmmakers, including Welles, Truffaut, Kurosawa and Kubrick. Ophüls’ films all share the same preoccupations: theater and spectacle, music, the past, memory, and the tension between social roles and self-consciousness. Above all, Ophüls' films have style. In cinema the word "stylist" is too often used to suggest a skillful decorator who applies pretty touches to cover up an absence of meaning; Ophüls' style, on the contrary, creates meaning. His virtuosic camera movements are the essence of rhythm, tempo, mood and texture.
