Film critic Andrew Sarris received this year's Mel Novikoff award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. This weekend we present two films by a director treasured by Mr. Sarris. The Earrings of Madame de... is the story of a life compromised by a pair of earrings. Sarris wrote, "(It) transforms an ironic literary work into a screen tragedy of the first magnitude. The film represents one of the last links between our jaded world and an earlier one in which it was still possible to mourn a lost innocence, a hopeless love, and a fall from worldly grace into spiritual submission. The mirrors and staircases of the film are endowed with a formal rigor and metaphysical urgency that elevate the trappings of La Belle Epoque into universal symbols of individual destiny and social intercourse. Darrieux, Boyer and De Sica glide gloriously across an ephemeral ecstasy of Ophulsian camera movements. The obsessiveness of romantic love has never been rendered more brilliantly, nor has the waltz been danced and tracked with such wondrous abandon."