Film historians have compared Helmut Käutner's most elegant work to Max Ophüls's Letter from an Unknown Woman. Even if that overstates the case, Käutner's subtle direction and intricate narrative structure together with Marianne Hoppe's radiant intensity surely produced Nazi Germany's most nuanced and sympathetic reflection on a woman who dreams of a vibrant and more exalted life. The opening sequence is a cinematic tour-de-force: the camera moves from the roofs of Paris, across a street square, up a house front, and gently insinuates itself into Madeleine's bedroom where she lies supine. It follows the husband's entrance and silently registers the undeniable traces of the couple's drab existence. Madeleine is introduced as a corpse and brought back to life in a narrative flashback, an investigation of her desperate and vain attempts to find what she lacks at home. Madeleine asks her lover, "Do we really have a right to be happy?" knowing that the question is rhetorical. Ever ironic, Käutner makes a cameo appearance as an author who fabricates a fictional identity for Madeleine which self-reflexively restates the melodrama's foregone tragic conclusion.-E.R.