Warming by the Devil’s Fire (an episode in the mini-series,
The Blues, 2003), among other films. Professor Naremore authored a book about Burnett’s work,
Charles Burnett: A Cinema of Symbolic Knowledge (University of California Press, 2017).
Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan in
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
The second part of the conversation concentrated on
Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), a film directed by German-born Max Ophuls while he was in exile in the US in the 1940s. Naremore has written a study of the film, recently published by BFI Film Classics. The film, produced by John Houseman and with a script by Howard Koch (a future blacklist victim), is based on a 1922 novella by Austrian author Stefan Zweig (1881-1942).