It's all a trifle, a flippant comedy by that incorrigible lusty libertine Arthur Schnitzler of pre-1900 Vienna, who made it his profession to tease the bourgeoisie by his very equivocal stories, always driving at the forbidden. Here is a bunch of lovers all betraying each other, there is no fidelity, no depth of feelings, just moving along from one bed to the next, and no one is even hurt - there is one wedded husband who finds it a little disappointing that his mistress doesn't turn up as they had agreed, but that's the worst hard feeling in the entire carousel of amorous exercises. The main thing is the supremely masterful direction, Max Ophuls' camera constantly moving around up and down and never resting in its enthusiastic exploration of relationships, and the scenery is exquisite to say the least and all the way. Of course, you recognise his dreamy settings of old Vienna from his earlier greatest film, "Letter from an Unknown Woman" on Stefan Zweig's short story, which made such an impression on his American audience that he stopped there to make two more films for them, but here he is back in Europe and in France and in his own private playground and home, and relishing it, enjoying it and making more than the best of it - his later French films are all exquisite masterpieces of refined taste, and this was the first of them. No superlatives are enough, they are all basically happy and fortuitous comedies, while the sad ending is only, that his last film, his first in colour and his most ambitious effort, "Lola Montez" five years later, was butchered and massacred by his producers and critics, which killed him at only 54 years. Yet he had made many of the most precious films ever made in continental Europe.
