White Roses

“To you, who never knew me.”

"Only one thing I did," confides the heroine to her secret love," on your birthday I always sent you a bunch of white roses, the very same ones you gave me after our first night of love. In these ten, in these eleven years, have you ever wondered who sent them?" He didn't, because for the writer she was only a fleeting adventure like dozens of others. White Roses is the yet to be discovered among the five cinema adaptations of Stefan Zweig's Letter from an Unknown Woman. It was directed by Hannu Leminen, a stylist with a keen sense of expressive set and heavy shadows. It is idle to speculate whether Max Ophüls, creator of the famous 1948 Hollywood adaptation, may have known this wartime Finnish production: the parallels are striking and Tauno Palo sublime as Louis Jourdan.

- Brigitte Mayr / Filmarchiv Austria
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