I sadly was not able to attend one of the harder-to-see films in BAM’s Max Ophüls’ series, his sole Dutch film, entitled
The Trouble with Money (1936). Luckily, a good friend and excellent writer
was there and has contributed a lengthy and insightful article on it at his blog,
Chained to the Cinémathèque. For anyone who has been reading the reports here on that fine retrospective, this write-up makes Max’s Dutch movie sound quite different from the others. Here’s a snippet:
“The Trouble with Money may currently be seen as a ‘minor’ Ophuls due to its rarity, but it is anything but. Instead, it is one of Ophuls’ major statements, an examination of the way participation in a system of exchange is both dehumanizing and de-moralizing.”