Max Ophüls directed so many masterpieces with great actor direction in great and sad love stories. All that shot with a virtuoso camera (travellings or real time shots like in "Madame De" or "Letters From An Unknown Woman").All these masterpieces are available. But there is one hidden masterpiece directed by Max Ophüls and it is one of his first movie : "La Signorra Di Tutti", only available in Italy (where it was shot, Ophüls was an international director). And it is an incredible masterpiece with again some virtuoso cinematography and narration (flashbacks in flashbacks). It is a powerful love drama with insane scenes.Sure Orson Welles watched it and provided him so many ideas. And 20 years later, Ophüls directed his most well known movie, "Lola Montès", with the same story.It is urgent to release this hidden treasure for real cinema lovers.

This is a stunning early sound film from Max Ophuls which deservedly won a 'technical' award at Venice. It's difficult to imagine that old Awesome did not include this in the dozens of films he watched before making Kane because Ophuls uses, some seven years earlier, many of the techniques, not least overlapping Sound, that crystallised in Kane. The plot verges on the melodramatic but the Style is something else; flashbacks within flashbacks, lush tracking shots, montages, dissolves, everything in fact from what those academics love to call the 'grammar' of film making is present and correct. A film in 1934 that begins with a wipe of the label on a 78 rpm record and ends on a static shot of the face of the heroine on a poster has to be out of the right bottle and this is vintage. Dix sur dix going away.

Signora di tutti is truly one of the most underrated films of movie history. When I saw it ten years ago I was marveled about its modernity although belonging to 1934. I´m sure Welles undoubtely watched it before filming Citizen Kane, because Max Ophuls´s narration and editing techniques in that picture somehow anticipated Orson´s landmark screen jewel. This movie deserves a standout place in the development of film language.

"La Signora di Tutti" is the only film the maestro Max Ophüls made in Italy and it already confirmed his genius. The film - an eloquent and often tragic study of an ill-fated movie star Gaby Doriot who rises her way to a depressingly patriarchal world and later becomes a victim of its cruelty - is certainly nowhere near the richness, splendour, and lilting mastery of Ophüls' celebrated later classics, but it is fascinating in its own ways. The intricate flashback structure and the beautiful Isa Miranda's heartbreaking incarnation of the spoiled Gaby seem to anticipate Ophüls' later works, particularly his final masterpiece, "Lola Montes" (1955). The film is apparently not for every taste but if you are a fan of Ophuls as I am, it is an indispensable viewing.