Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novella of 1922, is widely considered to be German born director Max Ophüls’s over-riding masterpiece. Now released for the first time in thirty years on the big screen it stars Joan Fontaine as a woman infatuated by the rakish former concert pianist Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan) who send him a letter that starts with the immortal line, ‘By the time you read this letter, I may be dead … The film then tells her heartbreaking tale, in flashback of unrequited love, of her affair with him and their child together that he is completely unaware of while Stefan simply wracks his brain to discover just which of his many hundreds of lovers she might have been..
On a completely different note, I was rather curious as to why director Nick ‘football factory’ Love would remake director/writer Alan Clarke’s seminal footie hoolie masterpiece, The Firm (1988). In the original Gary Oldman excels as he’s never done before or since, as Bexy, a successful thirty something professional who has grown fat on Thatcher’s boom, bought a flash motor, a detached houses and has a wife and a kid. Also the leader of the ICC- West Ham’s footie hoolie firm Bexy plans his violent ‘awaydays’ with military precision and dreams of taking on Europe. But of course, as in real life, the football is just an excuse for a good ruck or as Billy (Steve McFadden of East Enders’) says at the end: ‘if they ban them from football they’ll just switch to cricket, darts, anything that gives them the same excuse.’ The Firm much like Clarke’s other work, Scum and Made in Britain, caused middle England to call for it to be banned as it was the first movie ever made about football hooliganism and, had a massive impact on all young tearaways, some of whom like, Nick Love (who has Millwall tattooed on his lip) went onto make their won hoolie films and create a genre. At first I thought Love might have remade the film as a homage to Clarke updating and fine tuning but what he has done is take the premise of the psychopathic pack leader as a well to do businessman with a family and thus a double life and stick another story on it . In Love’s The Firm (2009) the psychotic Bex, brilliantly rendered with excruciating menace by relative new comer Paul Anderson, simply takes a young ‘un , Dom (Callum McNab) under his wing and shows him the ropes (albeit in a nasty, bullying, psychopathic way) gets him into the ‘firm’ and takes him out to fight. Of course, Dom soon sees that what he once thought as glamorous is anything but and that said football violence is propagated by nasty, horrible lowlifes who you wouldn’t want to sit next to on the bus, and in reality, said aggression can end in death and disfigurement. Pretty much a coming of age story, I applaud Love for making a film that, both hilarious and exciting, features some of the most realistic footie fight scenes I have seen on screen and simply delivers a most worthwhile lesson. It should be on the school curriculum.
Letter from an Unknown Woman opens in the BFI Southbank and all good art house cinemas on Friday www.bfi.org.uk/releases <http://www.bfi.org.uk/releases>
The Firm (2009) is available to rent or but RRP £15.99
The Firm (1988) special edition DVD is available to rent or but RRP £15.99
