La signora di tutti (1934) Everybody's Woman [Masters of Cinema #100] [Re-UP]

Director: Max Ophüls
Writers: Curt Alexander (screenplay), Salvatore Gotta (novel)
Stars: Isa Miranda, Memo Benassi, Tatyana Pavlova

With the Nazi terror on the ascent, master filmmaker Max Ophuls fled to Italy in 1934 and made La signora di tutti [Everybody’s Lady] — an exuberant, desperate melodrama that, although arriving early in Ophuls’ body of work, ranks comfortably alongside Letter from an Unknown Woman, Madame de…, or Lola Montès in the hierarchy of the director’s achievements.

Isa Miranda, one of Italy’s greatest stars, plays the role of a star revisiting her life in flashback after a suicide attempt leaves her comatose. From the record revolving on a turntable in the picture’s opening moments, Ophuls sets into motion one of those roundelays with fate that he alone could pull off with such eminent elegance.

A precursor to the romantic themes that would culminate in Lola Montès, Ophuls’ vertiginous La signora di tutti serves brilliantly as both an empathetic portrait of the femme fatale, and as an elevation of her glacial femininity to the level of sublime fetish. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Max Ophuls’ luminous La signora di tutti for the first time on DVD in the UK.

The film begins with theatrical agent Veraldi (Franco Coop), a wiry and self-confident dealer with a half Chelsea smile, arguing a movie deal for rising star Gaby Driot (aka Gabriella Murge before the poster girl name change, played by Isa Miranda) with the unnamed head of a large French production company (Mario Ferrari). The deal is struck, but come the first day of shooting there's no sign of the lead player, and Veraldi is sent to retrieve her from her hotel, but finds her unconscious on the bathroom floor, critically injured from a suicide attempt. She is rushed to hospital and prepared for a life-or-death operation, and as the anaesthetic takes hold she recalls her past life and the events that brought her to this pivotal moment.

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Such a brief but hopefully concise summary cannot hope to capture the runaway energy of these opening scenes. Starting with a spiral wipe on a spinning record from which Gaby's voice emanates signing the title song, we're plunged into the midst of a breathless debate in which Veraldi haggles prices and movie deal specifics, and then leap-frog to the first day of the film's production as a production assistant rockets through the studio in a search for the missing star, his every move followed by a camera that tracks and pans with him like an obsessive voyeur on a cardio programme. Even the preparations for Gaby's surgical procedure are strikingly realised, the anaesthetic delivered via a helmet that descends from up high like a torture device owned by Ming the Merciless.

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This dispensing with preamble continues in Gabriella's narcotic induced drift back to her schooldays, with the news that a tragedy has befallen teacher Professor Sommi prompting her to faint on the spot. We soon find out why. Family man Sommi had become infatuated with Gabriella, and unable to live without her has taken his own life. And who does the furious headmaster blame? You've got it. Expelled from school, she then incurs the wrath of her judgemental father (Lamberto Picasso), an ex-military man and widower whose over-protective attitude to his daughter may well be a key reason for her naivety over the opposite sex.

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The moment of confrontation between father and daughter, or the tense build-up to it, vividly personalises the experience by focussing exclusively on the terrified Gabriella as she clears the dinner table, awaiting the moment she'll have to answer for what happened while her father and sister Anna (Nelly Corradi) argue furiously in the next room. I remember the first time I saw Lindsay Anderson's If…. and marvelling the director's decision to stay with Mick Travis as he waited his turn to be caned by his peers, and at how closely this bonded us with the emotion of the experience by making it subjective, forcing us to share his trepidation at what was to come. A couple of years later I first saw Spartacus and realised that Stanley Kubrick had staged the exact same scene eight years earlier to even more stomach-churning effect, as Kirk Douglas and Woody Strode sit waiting their turn to fight to the death, while the fight that precedes theirs can be heard taking place unseen in the auditorium outside. The stakes may not be quite as high here, but in this very sequence Ophuls pre-dates even Kubrick by twenty-four years.

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He then delivers one of the film's many structural surprises by bypassing the confrontation and hopping forward to a point when Gabriella's punishment has been in place for some time, long enough for her and Anna to successfully persuade their father to allow them to attend a party being thrown by Roberto Nanni (Federico Benfer), the son of the local gentry and the second man to become captivated by Gabriella's beauty. At the party itself, Roberto dances with Gabriella and is soon declaring his determination to see her again, whatever his disapproving mother Alma (Tatiana Pawlova) might say. Except Alma proves notably less judgemental than expected and is touched by Gabriella's honesty and kindness, and with Roberto in Rome and her husband away on business, she asks Gabriella to visit her regularly. The two soon become close, their relationship developing into one of mutual emotional dependency, with Alma filling the hole left by the loss of Gabriella's mother, and Gabriella providing the companionship the weak bodied Alma craves in her own family's absence. This harmony is dented and eventually shattered by the arrival of Alma's husband Leonardo (Memo Benassi), who is bewitched from the moment he lays eyes on this newcomer and is soon spending far more time at the family home. Then one night a combination of Leonardo's infatuation, Alma's dependency and Gabriella's longing for emotional contact lead to tragedy…

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Any film that opens with a suicide attempt is unlikely to end happily, and if you're looking for an upbeat date movie to warm a winter's evening then you've come to the wrong place. This is a downbeat story in which Gabriella becomes the unwilling catalyst for the blind self-destruction of others. This leads to her being misunderstood by those who judge her, including some of the film's more ardent fans – on this very disc Tag Gallagher suggests that she is actually a witch, someone who unwittingly infects the lives of almost everyone she meets, but this strikes me very much as a male-centric reading and one that would not be out of place in the film itself. That she does not resist the attentions directed at her is taken as evidence of complicity rather than her longing for relationships she has never known and will ultimately never have. In Alma she finds the mother she has long since lost, and in Leonardo the emotional bond her authoritative father is unwilling to provide, a relationship foreshadowed by the early attentions of Professor Sommi. Her father angrily says to Anna at one point, "She doesn't know how dangerous she is," but the understanding that Gabriella really lacks is the danger represented by others and the potential consequences of her own emotional vulnerability.

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What makes the film so compelling and intermittently invigorating has less to do with the story than the manner in which it is told. There's not a shot nor a sequence here that hasn't been planned to perfection, a technical tour-de-force in which even the most complex camera moves and eye-catching edits are employed primarily to develop the the story and characters. By all means watch the film for the invention and energy of its filmmaking, as not a scene goes by that isn't littered with with technical elements worthy of academic study, but to do so in isolation would fail to acknowledge Ophuls' determination to tell Gabriella's story in genuinely cinematic terms. So innovative and confident is the filmmaking here that it's genuinely hard to believe this was made just seven years after The Jazz Singer first introduced the public to the concept of synchronised sound, but there is always clear purpose to the sometimes thrilling mobility of cinematographer Ulbaldo Arata's camera: as it glides through the film studio recording the search for the missing actress, it also neatly illustrates the sheer scale of the production in which she is starring, and when Gabriella and Roberto dance, the camera moves with them, capturing the emotion of the moment in a manner that would be reproduced and adapted in countless films to come. When it sweeps emotively around Leonardo to reveal the approaching Gabriella when the couple first meeting, a bond is instantly formed, one later developed by a long track up to the couple in intimate close-up and the twinned dolly shots following Leonardo's car shadows Gabriella's boat that cut with their conversation. And that, believe me, is just a sprinkling.

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It's this sometimes exuberant execution, coupled with a string of fine performances and some savvy support role casting, that makes this downbeat melodrama such consistent captivating viewing. Our engagement with Gabriella is one that prompts sadness and empathy with her and her fate, right up to the perfectly judged finality of the ending. The journey there allows for commentary on the potentially obsessive and damaging nature of desire and allows a few stabs at the vacuity of the star system ("An actress must be as the public wants her," Veraldi tells Gaby, "full of sunshine and youth"), but it's Gabriella herself who nail's the film's most poignant theme when she remarks of the social isolation into which she and Leonardo have been plunged, "We are very much alone, very alone."

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La Ronde aside, I'll confess to being less well versed in the cinema of Max Ophuls than I by all rights should be, so was perhaps even more astonished than the director's fan base by the sheer virtuosity of La signora di tutti, a melancholic but beautifully told story whose every scene bristles with small cinematic thrills. A lovely transfer, an informative documentary and a fine booklet make this something of a must-have. Warmly recommended.

DVD Outsider

Special Features:
• Beautiful new transfer of the film in its original aspect ratio
• New and improved optional English subtitles
• New 30-minute video-essay, So Alone…, produced for The Masters of Cinema Series by writer-critic-scholar Tag Gallagher

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