Letter from an Unknown Woman is the best of Ophüls’s American films and one of the most important to emerge in the USA during the latter half of the 1940s. Nevertheless, thanks to an ill-conceived promotional campaign, it was endorsed at the time as a film appealing to women, which discredited it in the eyes of the critics and ultimately damaged it commercially as well. In a series of flashbacks, Ophüls tells a story of love which never existed. Stefan Brand is a concert pianist and favourite with women; he buries his talent in a superficial bohemian lifestyle but his winning seductive manner can’t disguise his inability to love. The letter of the film’s title is what reveals to the aging charmer the kind of devotion that has passed him by. The director identified himself closely with his male protagonist, thus adding a self-critical, autobiographical element we won’t find in Stefan Zweig’s novella. As in the case of the celebrated film Flirtation (Liebelei), Ophüls worked with famous Austrian cinematographer and native of Karlovy Vary, Franz (Frank) Planer. Never previously put into Czech distribution, the film will now be screened in its newly restored version.