La Ronde (Films Sasha Gordine, Janus Films, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday at 9:15 p.m. I turned on a film from Turner Classic Movies that I’d been curious about for decades, literally: La Ronde, made in 1950 by director Max Ophuls (a German expat who’d fled the Nazis, ended up in France,then in the U.S. and finally back in France for the last seven years of his career). The source of the story was a turn-of-the-last-century play called Reigen by Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, and Ophuls and his co-writer, Jacques Natanson, kept the original setting of 1900 Vienna – though I had to keep reminding myself of that because it was a French film in more ways than one. Not only was all the dialogue in French, but the whole sexual sophistication of the piece seems more French than German or Austrian, and I had to keep reminding myself that this story wasn’t taking place in Paris. It begins with a character identified as “Raconteur” (which means storyteller or narrator), played by Anton Walbrook (who, like Ophuls, was a German-born refugee from the horrors of Nazism), who walks us through a series of sets that may be intended to represent a stage production, a film or real life. Then we meet the characters who will enact the titular merry-go-round of love, sex, romance and seduction: prostitute Léocadie (the young Simone Signoret) accosts a young cavalry officer named Franz (Serge Reggiani), telling him that she has sex for money with civilians but does servicemembers for free as a way of thanking them for their service.

Unable to find any more normal location for their tryst, they make out on a waterfront quay before Léocadie accuses Franz of rushing things just because it’s free and Franz next moves on to Marie (Simone Simon, returning to her native land and [playing a very different sort of role than her films for Val Lewton). Marie then has an affair-lette with Alfred (Daniel Gélin), who in turn seduces a married woman named Emma Breitkopf (Danielle Darrieux, another cast member who achieved at least a decent level of stardom on both sides of the Atlantic). The scene between her and her husband Charles (Fernand Gravey, who as Fernand Gravet had starred in MGM’s 1936 biopic of the Strauss waltz family, The Great Waltz) in bed together after her fling is one of the best parts of the movie. Ophuls films it looking through a clock that’s an assortment of phallic symbols (remember that Schnitzler lived in the same city at the same time as Sigmund Freud), including spread legs through which he and cinematographer, Christian Matras, point their camera lens, and an endlessly swinging pendulum obviously symbolizing a dick. Of course he sounds off on the immorality of extra-relational activities and warns his wife not to befriend any woman who does such things – and then, of course, in the next sequence he picks up a shopgirl, Anna (Odette Joyeux, whose name is the most obviously phony one since “Renée Adorée” in the silent days) and offers to make her his mistress.

Immediately after he’s set her up in an apartment he’s paying for, she brings home a man whom she thinks is a penniless poet but is actually a well-established dramatist named Robert Kuhlenkampf (Jean-Louis Barrault). Kuhlenkampf takes her to a performance of his latest hit play (without telling her he actually wrote it) and there strikes up a dalliance with one of the actresses in the cast, Charlotte (Isa Miranda, the actress critics loved to hate in her roles in the Fascist Italian spectacle Scipio Africanus and the U.S. remake of Hotel Imperial, but she turns out to be pretty good). Of course Charlotte is in turn having an affair with a count (Gérard Philipe), who shows up in a uniform so outrageously campy that my husband Charles, who arrived during the last few minutes of the film, asked whether it was set in Ruritania or in France. (Neither, I told him.) La Ronde is the sort of film that’s better in its parts than as a whole, but not only is it refreshingly (if a bit Continentally) cynical about the very idea of human monogamy, it’s full of odd bits of phallic symbolism. In the opening scene Franz has to return to the scene of his tryst with Marie because he’s left his sword behind, but as soon as the cavalry officer who upbraided him for this dereliction of duty has his own affair with the same woman, he too leave his sword behind – and so does the count in the final scene with Charlotte.

Ophuls and Natanson tried to link the stories together by having Anton Walbrook’s character walk through the entire movie, and sometimes interact with the other characters, notably when he turns up as the waiter in the high-class restaurant to which Alfred has taken Emma to seduce her in a private room. In his outro TCM hist Ben Mankiewicz said he thought Walbrook’s character made the movie,but I found him awfully intrusive and thought his presence turned the movie into a higher-class version of Where’s Waldo? Overall, La Ronde is a weirdly mixed movie, obviously done with style and wit but in some ways a dry run for Ophuls’ final film, Lola Montes (also with Walbrook), in which the idea of a narrator who’s also a characters is done better than it is here.