Max Ophüls's dark "Cinderella" melodrama belongs as much to the murky world of film noir as to the polished European dramas of high-society power games. Barbara Bel Geddes is a carhop who puts her hopes in a charm-school education and a modeling gig. When cold, demanding industrialist millionaire Robert Ryan suddenly proposes, her fashion magazine fantasies come true, but her loveless marriage makes her new mansion home a lonely gilded cage where she's more servant than wife. She runs off and becomes a white-collar receptionist (in furs and Saks gowns). James Mason, an idealistic doctor, hires her and slowly wins her heart, but her monstrous husband responds with a campaign of blackmail and psychological torments. Ophüls fights a script that all too often puts its themes into the mouth of Mason, whose constant harangues against the pursuit of money for money's sake sound increasingly like a broken record, but the director's delicate style beautifully captures both the surface elegance and emptiness of the millionaire lifestyle. Bel Geddes undergoes the transformation from a callow, naïve kid to a woman of strength and moral fortitude, while Mason tempers his saintliness with moments of doubt. Ryan reveals himself as a chillingly cruel manipulator whose only goal is to "win" at all costs. Ophüls beautifully twists the American dream into a nightmare where even the happy ending feels just a bit tarnished. --Sean Axmaker
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