Rent Everybody's Woman (1934)

Another Spiral Staircase - Everybody's Woman review by CH

Some titles cannot be euphoniously translated. And so they remain La Traviata and Cosi fan tutti. This thought comes to mind when watch Max Ophuls's Everybody's Woman (1934), a coarser title than La signora di tutti.

With the advent of the Nazis, Ophuls sought refuge in Italy before a move to Hollywood. This stay yielded one film, from a cliff-hanging serialised story by Salvatore Gotta. On screen, it opens with film star Isa Miranda's suicide attempt upon a smart bathroom floor and, as the gas mask lowers upon her head in the operating theatre, all dissolves into the sequence of events which brought her to this sorry pass.

The first of the men to fall for her was a married teacher, whose declaration of love is such that he cannot live without her, and dies by his own hand – a scandal which obliges her to leave and spend a year cooped up at her parents' home. Pressure is brought for her to attend a dance in a large, grand house, and there she dances with the son (Freidrich Benfer) who appears to spurn her but she takes on a job as assistant to his well-nigh bed-bound mother (Russian-born Tatyana Pavlova - and to say any more would rob viewers of the suspense of a melodrama whose continual movement owes so much to everything which Ophuls had learned in Germany.

Here, in light and shade, often in deep focus, are dances, a boat upon a lake, many a wide, twisting staircase, glimpses of transcontinental railway trains as one and all – even the servants – are caught up in a drama whose coils appear driven by fate itself.

For all that glamorous Isa manipulates the situations, hauling herself from one situation to the next, it is as if she is trying to make up for that initial adversity of the schoolroom. A pattern is set. As she moves forward she is continually stumbling over herself.

Such is Ophuls's skill that one never pauses to deem it an outlandish scenario. It is ravishing, and should be more widely known.