Hello, my name is Justin Clue and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club.

And today we're talking about Max Ophels, the director that was the master of the tracking shot.

He's known for tracking shots.

He's known for creating a beautiful and glamorous Misan with your elegant

costumes and your elegant sets. He's known for telling stories from a woman's point of view,

and he's known for weaving melodramatic tales that aim right for the heart. And you know what,

Justin, all these things are true. Let me start with a quote, though, from an article by John Halliday, featured in Richard

Rounds, Cinema, a critical dictionary.

When Max Ophels died in a hospital in Hamburg in 1957, at the age of 55, the book beside

the bed was Gersa's Faust.

And just as Faust will probably remain beyond the reach of cinema, so the

cinematic work of Marx Ophels will probably remain beyond the reach of words and verbal criticism

forever. Good night, everybody. That's been the important cinema club. Drat. And yet, and yet that

entry in that book runs, what, 2,000 words? So clearly, clearly people have written things about him.

In fact, it seems to me in my research that O'Fills is somebody who really united a lot of the big mid-century critics.

You know, he was a great favorite of Andrew Serras, great favorite of Pauline Kale.

He's somebody who, when Andrew Saras was popularizing the

O'Tooer Theory, Max O'Fools became one of the central figures of that, because O'Fools is one of

those directors who can take a script that could have been filmed by anyone. You know,

Michael Curtis could have filmed one of these scripts, and he imbues it with whole new layers of meaning through his

visual style. So I'm going to quote a bit from Andrew Saris here in his book, The American Cinema.

...