Rent Everybody's Woman (1934)

3.7 of 5 from 63 ratings
1h 25min
Rent Everybody's Woman (aka La Signora Di Tutti) Online DVD & Blu-ray Rental
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Synopsis:
With the Nazi terror on the ascent, master filmmaker Max Ophuls fled to Italy in 1934 and made La signora di tutti (Everybody's Lady) - an exuberant, desperate melodrama that, although arriving early in Ophuls' body of work.
Isa Miranda, one of Italy's greatest stars, plays the role of a star revisiting her life in flashback after a suicide attempt leaves her comatose. From the record revolving on a turntable in the picture's opening moments, Ophuls sets into motion one of those roundelays with fate that he alone could pull off with such eminent elegance. A precursor to the romantic themes that would culminate in Lola Montes, Ophuls' vertiginous La signora di tutti serves brilliantly as both an empathetic portrait of the femme fatale, and as an elevation of her glacial femininity to the level of sublime fetish.
Actors:
, , , Friedrich Benfer, , , Nelly Corradi, , Mattia Sassanelli, Luigi Barberi, , , , Alfredo Martinelli,
Directors:
Producers:
Angelo Rizzoli
Writers:
Curt Alexander, Salvatore Gotta, Max Ophüls, Hans Wilhelm
Aka:
La Signora Di Tutti
Studio:
Eureka
Genres:
Drama
Collections:
A History of Films about Film: Part 2, Masters of Cinema, A Brief History of Film..., Top Films
Countries:
Italy
BBFC:
Release Date:
29/11/2010
Run Time:
85 minutes
Languages:
Italian Dolby Digital 1.0
Subtitles:
English
DVD Regions:
Region 2
Formats:
Pal
Aspect Ratio:
Full Screen 1.37:1
Colour:
B & W
Bonus:
  • Beautiful new transfer of the film in its original aspect ratio
  • New 30-minute video-essay, So Alone..., produced by writer-critic-scholar Tag Gallagher

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Reviews (1) of Everybody's Woman

Another Spiral Staircase - Everybody's Woman review by CH

Spoiler Alert
07/07/2021

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.

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