Max Ophuls’s Le Plaisir (1952) has been out of circulation for much too long. It has at last reemerged on DVD, a fine release from Criterion now joining Second Sight’s U.K. edition. Its appearance ends a deprivation and is an occasion of joy.
The Earrings of Madame de … was Max Ophuls’s penultimate film, preceding the difficult experience of Lola Montes (1955) and his untimely death at the age of fifty-five in 1957. Into it, as though he somehow sensed that his career was about to end, he collected so many of the themes that had preoccupied him over the previous two decades…