Danielle Darrieux is simply stunning in this all time classic from Max Ophuls, the third and final pairing of the famed actress and her obsessive auteur, who complements her vulnerability and incredible beauty with flowing long takes and close-ups that renders the spectator hopeless against an all controlling cinematic gaze. Darrieux is Madame de, the bored wife of a stern General (top billed Charles Boyer), who one day pawns her expensive earrings, a wedding present from her new groom, to pay off increasing debts. The earrings represent the meaninglessness of her marriage, but when they travel from owner to owner (in a circular trope most memorable from Ophuls’s “La Ronde”), and finally end up back in her possession, a gift from a new lover (Vittorio De Sica, suave and handsome), they become a fetish of impossible power and meaning. Ophuls, cinematographer Christian Matras, and set designer Jean d’Eaubonne create a lush upper class world of operas, dances, mirrors, staircases, carriages, and quiet adultery and contrast it against the General’s rigid honor and militarism, so when we hear booming cannons in one sequence, or a single gunshot in a climactic duel, the sound effect is both jarring and representative of a society whose pettiness is matched only by its aggressive nature to dominate and remain respectable. The Criterion Collection gives this masterpiece due respect with 75 minutes of bonus analysis, a scholarly commentary track and interviews, including a hilarious archived piece featuring stuffy old author Louise de Vilmorin, who blasts Ophuls for changing crucial plot points of her short romance novel and deems the film “boring”, which as we know, is anything but.