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Studlar draws on the history of fashion and on feminist evaluations of melodrama in her assessment of the signifying effects of costume in Ophuls' American "women's films." He focuses mainly on the movies, Letter from an Unknown Woman and Caught. In both films, the heroines support themselves by becoming fashion models, thus foregrounding costuming as fashion and the female protagonists' relationship to it.

As PAM COOK and other feminist film scholars have argued, costuming is a neglected but important element of mise-en-scène in the cinema (41; Gaines 7). This relative neglect is an overdetermined phenomenon: costuming is often regarded as tangential rather than central to the creation of received meaning; it is associated with frivolous "feminine" ornamentation rather than with a serious "masculine" narrative; there is also the perception that costuming is subordinate to other more dominant and transparent carriers of narrative and meaning that have well-established critical vocabularies to describe them. Even within feminist film criticism, the relative neglect of costuming may be related to the perception that the specifics of costuming are not worth looking at very carefully since their broader functions seem so obvious. In this line of thinking, costuming is largely a tool for women's oppression: it satisfies the fetishistic gaze of the male and turns the woman into a fetish object. Laura Mulvey implicitly articulates this theoretical position on costuming in her seminal 1975 article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," when she argues for the fetishistic effect of the female image on film's male spectators (6-18). According to Mulvey, all (heterosexual) males who view the cinema function psychologically as fetishists who, according to Freud, require a fetish in order to make the "castrated" woman into an "acceptable" sexual object. The fetish is the object through which the male subject holds at bay his knowledge of the woman's anxiety-provoking castration. The woman's castration is disavowed in an "I know but nevertheless" psychological formula that follows the pattern first set in childhood when the boy discovers the mother's castration and disavows it with a magical formula that attributes a phallus to the mother through the fetish: "In this fetish she has a phallus" (Freud 215-17). Mulvey's theory of the cinematic function of the woman's body logically extends to costuming as part of cinema's fetishistic treatment of women. Her argument makes all spectators participate in the gaze of the psycho-sexually anxious male. For him, alone, suggests Mulvey, the cinema-and female costuming-is constructed.

Mulvey's views on male spectatorship in relation to the cinematic image of woman have been subject to extensive revision in the intervening years, with some theorists (including myself), arguing that the woman, even as fetish, is not necessarily just the passive object of the male's controlling, sadistic, and voyeuristic gaze (Studlar, In the Realm 38-41; Gaines 23; White 143-44). Theories incorporating notions of the masquerade that draw on the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and/or Joan Riviere have also incorporated a consideration of costuming, in that they examine the process whereby the woman uses the signs of "womanliness." Those signs include those provided by costuming as well as social behavior as the means of disguising the fact that the woman has masculine attributes (intellect, assertiveness, etc.) for which she might be punished by patriarchal society (Doane, Femmes 17-32, 33-43).

In some film theory formulations of the masquerade, women's assumption of costuming is offered as a way of changing identity and confusing the male gaze. Costuming is implicated in women's appropriation of something originally intended to fix their identity, erotically and socially. Instead of fixing identity, costuming helps in the process of transforming femininity into a triumphant transgression of identity categories (Studlar, "Masochism" 229-49; Cook 43-46). Nevertheless, inescapable is the basic observation that costuming in the cinema functions generally to build up the beauty of the woman, especially that of the female star, to make her an attractive sexual object to the male. However, as I will argue in this essay, the situation can be more complex than this generalization may lead us to assume-even in classical Hollywood cinema.

At this point, it is important to define two key terms. Costume and fashion are not synonymous. They are obviously both terms that apply to clothes, and they are both designed products, but fashion design and costume design have different venues and functions. We presume that fashion exists as part of culture and is an industry based on the premise of generating a desire in consumers for products (clothes) that continually change in order to generate even more desire (for the newest product). By way of contrast, costuming exists in support of a fiction (whether theatrical, balletic, or cinematic), and primarily has a textual function. In the case of Hollywood, early on in the history of full-length narrative film, that textual function was expanded into the extratextual realm. It was realized in the 19105 that cinematic costuming and its accessories could become part of the appeal of the cinema, enhancing profit. Extending cinematic costuming into the off-screen realm of reallife fashion made for profitable commodities as well as created more avenues for marketing the film (Eckert 110-21 ). It followed that in classical Hollywood film, women's costumes in particular were most often made to be "fashionable," that is, to reflect or set a course for contemporary fashion, even if a key purpose of the costuming design was to place the film within a past historical period. As Cook has pointed out, the tension between historical fidelity and aesthetic stylization has found a rich and controversial meeting point in costuming (75-76).

Feminists often argue that women are ideologically inculcated by the patriarchy to psychologically invest in fashion commodities in ways that turn them away from finding real solutions to their problems. This is reflected in the view of Rosalind Coward, who argues of modern Western culture: "Female desire is courted with the promise of future perfection . . . the ideals on offer don't actually exist except as the end product of photographic techniques or as elaborate fantasies . . . female dissatisfaction is constantly recast as desire, as desire for something more ... for the ideal" (13). From this perspective, costuming demonstrates how the film industry builds its profit by encouraging women to invest emotionally in the ideal of fetishized screen femininity, preferably by literal investment in fashion tie-ins to films. These fashion commodities are given an even greater cachet by virtue of their association with the on-screen perfection of the glamorous female stars that women seek to imitate (Stacey 195-58). In historical terms, this function for screen costuming turned into women's fashion was more overtly articulated, textually and extratextually, in specific genres aimed at women, such as the musical, romantic comedies, and the "woman's picture" or female-centered melodrama.

COSTUMING AND MAX OPHULS' MODEL HEROINES

In this article, I will be addressing the role of costuming in constructing "femininity" in the best known Max Ophuls films from his American period: Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and Caught (1949). In both films, the heroines support themselves hy becoming fashion models, thus foregrounding costuming as fashion and the female protagonists' relationship to it. Women's costuming, defined within each film as contemporary fashion, functions-in concert with numerous elements-to define these women characters' economic, psychological, and sexual status. It follows that the title of this essay also refers to more complex relations than may he first apparent. While I wish to suggest that there is an implied recognizable system to "fashioning femininity" in these two films directed by Max Ophuls, my interest is not in the literal authorship of costume design in these two films. I am not suggesting that the director (credited on screen for these films as "Max Opuls") is primarily responsible for the design of the costumes that appear in these films. A director's impact on cinematic costuming is variable, and production histories of Ophuls' films may, in the future, speak to this issue of authorship and costume design with regard to these two films.

We do know that two powerful costume designers were given screen credit in these films, Orry-Kelly for Caught, and Travis Banton for Letter from an Unknown Woman. Yet, any costume that appears in a film becomes experientially-as the film unfolds to the audience-the product of a collaboration between the designer, the director, the cinematographer, and the actor who wears the material incarnation of the design. In this sense, just as actors are directed, so too, are costumes. Any costume in a film should be considered, not just as an abstract preproduction design, as an image drawn on paper or described in isolation, but as an integrated element of cinematic mise-en-scène that appears on living bodies moving through time. This costuming element is captured through composition, camera perspective, and lighting. It functions actively as an element contributing to narrative and character development. Thus, I am arguing that we should look to/through a contextualization of costuming both on and off screen. With regard to the latter, the social audience brings different levels of interest and knowledge of costuming to the process. Costumes are "received" by their audience, which is important to keep in mind in order to distinguish the potential textual meanings that costumes may open up to viewers. This is particularly important in reference to these films, which I argue address quite self-consciously the role of fashion in the construction of femininity within fictional/but highly socially resonant milieux-post World War II America in Caught and fin de siècle Vienna in Letter from an Unknown Woman.

The approach of these two films to costuming is in contradiction to a remark made by director George Cukor: "Hollywood wardrobes are created all to serve the picture-not to make fashion. They must fulfill two requirements: (1) they must serve the dramatic purpose of the script by helping to make the character believable and not distract from the scene, and (2) they must be photogenically best for the actress" (qtd. in Bailey 8). As so often in life (and in Hollywood), what Cukor said and what he actually did in his films were two different things. This is well illustrated by his film, The Women (1940), which is paradigmatic of the "excessive" role that costuming can take in a woman's film. Costume as fashion is celebrated (and foregrounded) throughout the black-andwhite film by virtue of the high fashion "wardrobes" worn by the large female cast. Sometimes the costumes are not "photogenically best," as in those worn by Sylvia (portrayed by Rosalind Russell), the character who provides the film's largest dose of comic relief. To add to this "distraction" from the storyline, late in the film a Technicolor fashion show is presented to an affluent female audience. This show unfolds onscreen in front of an audience of women including the main characters who exist in the black and white diegetic space of the story. This self-reflexive use of costuming illustrates the variability of costume's function within film texts, especially those aimed at women.

Melodrama, the meat-and-potatoes of the woman's film, has, as Jane Gaines notes, often employed costuming as a rhetorical tool to achieve melodramatic expressiveness. She suggests that "the empathetic costuming of the woman's film heroine in the depths of despondency works somewhat like the surrogate sufferer device. Richness of feeling deserves enriched texture. . . . These fabrics seem to capture and hold the pathos before our eyes" (208). Drawing on Barthes' idea of obtuse meanings insinuated by images, Gaines cites a fur-trimmed costume designed by Orry-Kelly for Bette Davis' doomed heroine in Dark Victory (1939). The heroine wears the fox-fringed hat and coat in close-ups that mark the scene in which she learns by chance that she is dying. Gaines asks of this filmic/costuming moment: "How can an image be horrible and beautiful at once, unless what we are looking at is the image of her glorious suffering intermingled with the disease itself?" (210-11). While this metaphoric argument may itself suggest melodramatic excess, Gaines' claim that the classical Hollywood melodrama regularly creates more "costume surplus" than many other genres, but motivates, organizes, and uses this "excess" remains credible. She is led to conclude that "all apparent excesses (even style extravagance) are not excessive" within films that exteriorize women's suffering (211). Gaines' remarks are intended to motivate us to question the usual assumptions about the hierarchical relationship between narrative unity and cinematic excess in classical Hollywood film. In addition, we may also conclude that in women's films, as a subcategory of melodrama, it is not all that unusual for costume to be an important "distraction." At moments, costuming may become one of the primary, if not the "main attraction," whether as pure fashion signifier or as fashion transformed into signifiers of the interior drama of femininity in crisis.

Caught and Letter from an Unknown Woman are women's films, melodramatic in their dramatic intent and narrative structure. They also demonstrate how Hollywood film could appeal self-consciously to its audience's desire for fashion while using those same costume signifiers to call into question that desire's efficacy in achieving traditional feminine goals. I will be arguing for a melodramatic use of costuming in these two films in the sense that costuming functions in Caught and Letter from an Unknown Woman as a coherent if wordless expressive strategy. More centrally, I will be arguing that their "costume strategies" quite logically and predictably reinforce the narrative structure of the films in their critique of the patriarchal construction of the feminine.

"I WANT THAT ONE!"

Mary Anne Doane and more recently, Susan White, have addressed how Caught operates as a women's film that speaks femininity through the woman as the protagonist of melodrama (Doane, Desire 155-75; White 241-57). In her consideration of Caught in The Desire to Desire, Doane regards the film as a Hollywood text that foregrounds the commodity-image of the heroine within the framework of a "paranoid woman's film" typical of the 19405. In illustrating this framework, Doane discusses a scene in Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) in which the heroine (Joan Fontaine) looks at a fashion magazine and then wears a dress that duplicates the low-cut, sophisticated evening wear she saw depicted there. In changing her usual schoolgirlish attire of tweed skirt and sweater set, the insecure young woman attempts to gain the attention of her husband. Doane remarks of this scene that "the desire" of the woman is "to duplicate a given image, to engage with and capture the male gaze" (156). That desire, Doane says, is expressed by the woman as a desire for an image-to own or possess it (168-69). This leads to a collapsing of subject and object characteristic of the woman in many psychoanalytic theories of the feminine and reproduced in Doane's own theorization of female spectators in relation to cinematic representation. Ultimately, she is led to declare "the impossibility of female spectatorship" (175).

In discussing Caught, Doane applies this theoretical view to her analysis of the beginning of the film. Under the credits, a closeup of an open fashion magazine appears. The pages turn. After the director's credit, the magazine is shown from a slightly more distant vantage point. Women's hands point at different pages, at the dresses, diamonds, and furs. Emanating from off-screen, the voices of two women can be heard commenting on the desirability of this and that item. The camera then tracks back to reveal these two women; one, dressed in a robe, sits on the edge of a small bed looking over the shoulder of the other, who has the magazine propped on the bed in front of her as she lies stretched out on her stomach. The apartment behind the women appears dark and small.

As Doane says, this opening serves as a visual condensation of the cultural force that links commodity culture and feminine desire. Within this negative view of women's desire for fashion commodities, the woman is entrapped in a system that teaches her to seek such commodities in order to make herself, in Doane's words, "the ultimate commodity . . . the body adorned for the gaze" (156). Hence, the much remarked-upon use of the mink coat in Caught as a signifier of the desire of the heroine, Maude (Barbara Bel Geddes), who is attired in this first scene in casual Capri dungarees and loose shirt as she and her roommate, Maxime (Ruth Brady), peruse a fashion magazine. As an escape from her working-class lifestyle, Maude wants to marry a wealthy man, a "Prince Charming." She scrimps enough money from her salary as a carhop to enroll in a charm school. She uses this experience to secure a job as a model in a department store.

There, as she models a mink coat, she is spied by an assistant to Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan). The assistant invites her to a party to be held on the yacht of Ohlrig, a Howard Hughes-like oil millionaire. Unbeknownst to Leonora, Smith Ohlrig is not only incredibly rich, but also psychologically unstable and given to psychosomatically induced "heart attacks" that render him helpless. In route to the party, Leonora meets the elusive Ohlrig. He is disagreeable and disdainful, but that doesn't stop him from trying to get her to sleep with him the first night. In spite of the rocky start, they date again. They are not in love, but Ohlrig proposes to her in an attempt to prove his psychiatrist wrong in his declaration that Smith Ohlrig is incapable of sustaining an intimate relationship with a woman; Leonora accepts, but their marriage is unhappy, and Leonora flees to the city. There she is nicknamed "Lee" by Doctor Larry Quinada (James Mason), the young physician who hires her as a receptionist in his office. The doctor and his partner's patients are all from poor working-class families. Leonora dons a cheap, clear plastic raincoat, and leaves her fabulous mink in the closet of her small apartment when she goes to work. In her new surroundings, the mink would be an inappropriate, ostentatious display of wealth; in emotional terms, it is a sign of the disappointing life with Smith Ohlrig that she is trying to leave behind. As the doctor's emotional attachment to Lee grows, he makes her a gift of a new cloth coat to replace the plastic one that he believes is her only, and highly inadequate one. They fall in love, but when she discovers she is pregnant by her husband, Lee returns to Smith Ohlrig. Unaware that she is married, Quinada comes to retrieve Lee/Leonora, but Smith Ohlrig threatens to take Leonora's child when it is born. Leonora stays, but is a virtual prisoner in the mansion. Leonora is on the verge of mental and physical collapse when Smith Ohlrig is rendered helpless by one of his many fits of anger. Quinada rescues Leonora, but she suffers a miscarriage. Smith Ohlrig's fate is unknown.

The beginning of Caught succinctly establishes how this Cinderella scenario gone wrong is originally fantasized and articulated almost exclusively by Leonora as the acquisition of clothes and jewelry. Nevertheless, what is not indicated by Doane's analysis of Caught as a gothicinfluenced paranoid woman's film is the great deal of emotional ambiguity-and visual qualification-attached to Leonora's desire for high fashion. Visual qualifications are attached to high fashion in Caught, and a counter-discourse is formed by the film's visual articulation of an alternative costuming discourse, one that marks the construction of a utilitarian and non-exhibitionist femininity marking the emergence of "Lee" Eames. This discourse/counter-discourse extends beyond the mink coat/cloth coat dichotomy described by both Doane and Susan White (Doane, Desire 157, 172; White 244-46, 250-01, 256). By analyzing the specifics of this discursive struggle between competing modes of costuming, we can understand how the emotional ambiguity of Maude/Leonora/Lee with regard to her move up the class ladder through self-commodification is visualized in Caught to undermine the "normal," unreflective appeal of high fashion costuming of Hollywood film to female viewers.

In the opening scene, Maude Eames' desire for high fashion, jewelry, and a mink coat is contrasted with her living circumstances and her class origins, all of which are inscribed visually. These are evoked in the dimly lit, cramped apartment she must share with a roommate, but also through her casual shirtwaist, rolled up casual pants ("pedal pushers") and her references to her bare, aching feet, a professional hazard of her job as a carhop. Her ambition to escape this life and her fantasy of an ideal existence find their literalization in the magazine. How will she turn into a beautiful woman of wealth and high fashion? She needs to meet the kind of man who can provide her with such a life. Rather than being passive, Maude is active in making sure this will happen. She scrimps money to attend the Dorothy Dale charm school at night so that she can become a model. She calls herself "Leonora," a name that she impulsively chooses, perhaps thinking that it sounds more refined and upper class than her own.

Caught suggests through its narrative, social, and spatial complexity that the woman's "becoming the image" is highly problematic. Costuming is a key part of this problematization of the patriarchal imaging of femininity. The early scenes of Caught show how the abstracted pages of Vogue, indeed, cannot "come to life" without damaging complications to the woman who attempts to live them. The impossibility of imperfect reality reproducing an ideal image of womanhood is reiterated later in the film through a tabloid newspaper/media montage that announces the miracle of Leonora's wedding to Smith Ohlrig. The montage shows newspaper headlines and photos of the modern American "Cinderella." "Model Nabs Millionaire" declares one banner headline. Another says: "Smith Ohlrig Weds Former Car-Hop." In front page photos, Leonora is shown as a sweater-clad carhop, as a glamorous model in a hip-thrusting pose, and as a new bride emerging from a building with her publicity-shy groom (who hides his face behind his hat). Yet, within the diegetic space of the narrative, we never see Leonora as confident, as sexy, or as unfettered by problems as in these images-the isolated images airbrushed and manipulated for public consumption. No wonder that Quinada later remarks that he did not recognize Leonora from the newspaper pictures. Early on in the film Leonora herself seems to recognize the gap between women's real lives and how those lives are marketed to other women when she speculates that Miss Dorothy Dale's photo in the charm school's advertising is touched up to improve on the real thing.

Very quickly Caught problematizes the ubiquitous fantasy image of the glamorous fashion model. In her job at a department store, Leonora swirls amidst the store customers as she recites the price of the mink she models. But Leonora's assumption of the image of a high fashion model does not prevent her from being gently "manhandled" by two women customers and compelled to assent to a man's demand that she open the fur coat to reveal "the lining." The disgruntled look on Leonora's face to this request indicates that she too well understands that Franzi (Curt Bois) is examining her thinly clad body, not the coat lining. This scene tells us that the mink does not protect Leonora from being socially and sexually demeaned. On the contrary, it increases the possibility. Leonora's body-as well as the clothes draped on it-are obviously intended to be on exhibitionist display for the gaze of customers, but the scene in the department store also accentuates the fact that her body is made physically accessible to the touch of strangers. In this respect, the scene is a more serious and self-conscious version of the comic scene in Cukor's The Women where Sylvia violates the rules of the fashion show by rising up out of the audience to physically accost a fashion model whom she suspects of sleeping with her husband.

Throughout the film, Leonora will be sexualized in her acquisition and wearing of high fashion/expensive garments, but contrary to Cukor's dictum that cinematic fashions should flatter the star, neither actress Bel Geddes or her character are glamorized by her costumes in the way that, for example, the sympathetic heroine, Mary (Norma Shearer) is in The Women. In her extensive analysis of Caught and Letter from an Unknown Woman, Susan White suggests that Bel Geddes may have been cast by Ophuls and his film's producers for her lack of star glamour (241). Certainly lighting, composition, and even her makeup and hairstyles undermine her attractiveness rather than enhance it at moments when Leonora's/Bel Geddes' sexuality is being constructed for the millionaire she seeks (at least on a semi-conscious level) to ensnare for economic reasons.

Preparing for the yacht party hosted by Smith Ohlrig, Leonora dejectedly sits on her bed; light and shadow fall unflatteringly across her face and body as she panics over what she will wear: she has donned a strapless dress with an overly tight bodice; grotesque, oversized beads hang around her neck. Constructing femininity is a group effort. Not only her roommate, but a neighbor also try to help by contributing items for the proper effect, but Leonora decides she "looks horrible," and, indeed, the film leads us agree. We are also led to agree that the "whole set up," the sexual one to which she alludes (as a pick-up party girl), is wrong for her. The next scene reflects, not only the noir world she will enter with the mentally disturbed Smith Ohlrig, but her discomfort with cultural norms of female exhibition. The scene opens with a long shot of her sitting-in profile-pensive, self-containedabsolutely inner-directed-and, most important, in a costume that will undergo re-iteration and transformation throughout the film in moments where her femininity is associated with her original class and with her "natural" desire to detach herself from the cultural imperative that demands women create an exhibitionist image of sexually alluring femininity. Leonora has abandoned the tight strapless dress and beads she wore in the previous scene. Instead, her dress is a low-key, ingénueish adaptation of the postwar New Look-a short-sleeved, shirtwaist dress with a long, full, billowing skirt, a high small collar trimmed in lace, and plackets down the front of the bodice featuring a button closure. The bodice of the dress is a semi-transparent, pale shade fabric with an under(shirt)/slip that forms the popular "sweetheart" line, yet overall, it is sexually modest, apparently inexpensive daywear.

The shirtwaist style might suggest an unwarranted (bourgeois) repression of feminine sexuality, but in this film it is continually reiterated as an admirable sign of Leonora's attempt to escape from the conflated regimes of consumerist excess and feminine identity as fetishistic exhibitionism. The shirtwaist effect will become the sign in the film of Leonora's return to her class origins and to sexual modesty. Leonora is in the shirtwaist when she demands Smith Ohlrig take her home (and not into his house for a drink and sex); it will become the predominant style associated with Leonora's employment as a doctor's receptionist and even in her romantic courtship with him. For female audiences of 1949, the shirtwaist dress, tailored bodice paired with skirt, as well as the shirtwaist style receptionist's/nurse's white uniform Leonora assumes would likely have recalled wartime fashion, with its masculine functionality, patriotic conservation of materials, and sexually modest "coverage." After all, who but shirkers and married men were left stateside during the war to dress for? We should not forget too, that after World War II, the shirtwaist was re-feminized by designers like Givenchy with diaphanous fabrics, lace, highly decorated collars, and billowing sleeves (Studlar, "Chi-Chi" 159-65). We see this more feminized version of the shirtwaist on Leonora in the bar scene where Dr. Quinada proposes to her, a scene made even more interesting by the conventionally sexualized woman (long hair and low dress) who tries to pick up Quinada and the placement of Leonora and the doctor, who sit side by side (almost looking into the camera), rather than across the table from each other in the arrangement normally expected of a romantic courtship scene. Their spatial placement in the mise-en-scène suggests equality and companionship rather than male dominance and romance as the appropriate resolution of the differences between male and female.

By way of contrast, in her marriage to Smith Ohlrig, Leonora will dress rich in New Look-influenced attire of expensive fabrics, yet she will be in continual fear of or conflict with her millionaire husband. For her husband, Leonora's dresses in Orry-Kelly's most extravagant creation for the film: a ball gown. The gown is opulent, constructed in a rich, heavy satin, with a gossamer bodice accent, tiny pointed, capped sleeves, and a flowing skirt. It is typical of the New Look. Here, however, Leonora's appearance in the gown is depicted as both too much and incomplete in fashion terms that reflect her class insecurities and ignorance of upper-class norms. The ball gown is too much in the sense that it is not "event" driven. Leonora is not attending the kind of major social event that requires such a gown. Even though it is night (the time of an appropriate event for this attire), Leonora is overdressed. Her attire is also incomplete; she does not wear gloves, which would be imperative to complete the impact of a gown of this type in 1949. This too, suggests her lack of fashion (and class) understanding that is implicitly referenced by Smith Ohlrig and Quinada when they each make fun of her charm school style. It is the middle of the night. Leonora and Franzi are waiting up, anticipating the possible (hut unannounced) return of Smith Ohlrig. We can only surmise that Leonora's lower-class insecurities have led to her to overdressing, but there is also the possibility that she has been influenced by overzealous prompting of Franzi, who first "pimped" Leonora for Smith Ohlrig and encourages her to freshen up as Smith Ohlrig arrives.

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Yet, contra Doane's argument, Bel Geddes' subtle performance also serves to suggest that Leonora knows that there is a distinction between the image she attempts to become and her own embodiment of it (Desire 168-69). Any effect of glamorization that the New Look costume might accrue is undermined by lighting, figure placement, Leonora's obvious fatigue arid fear, and the demeaning situation in which her husband places her when he imperiously barges in with his male cohorts. The gown does, however, succeed in calling attention to Leonora's breasts-which are emphasized throughout in the scene by her placement in the frame, the angle of the camera, and the lighting. This attention is particularly evident when she sits listening to Smith Ohlrig, and later, when, still dressed in this low-cut satin evening gown, she is forced to attend his screening of films of himself to his allmale entourage.

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At this screening, he sexually humiliates Leonora, accusing her of flirting with one of his "friends." This is an act that is anticipated, even required, in a perverse way, by the ball gown's exhibition of Leonora's body. As Pam Cook suggests, the New Look's "emphasis on breasts and hips seemed to accentuate women's fertility, suggesting that their social role from now on would be reproductive rather than productive" (53). Maureen Turim has characterized the New Look's flowing curves, regarded by some in the late 19405 as uncomfortable and impractical, as a fashionable return to "gilded bondage."("Designing" 1990: 227). Indeed, Leonora's pregnancy by Smith Ohlrig almost traps her forever into a nightmare marriage that might be described as a similar kind of "bondage."

Leonora is sexualized by these New Look style costumes, but unlike the trajectory of many women's films, in which the goal is for the heroine to fully become the "star persona" who can be defined by extravagant, glamorous clothes (even if she is marrying "down"), Leonora has no star image to inhabit. Bel Geddes had no box-office advantage or special following, even within the confines of the woman's film genre. The actress's voice, rather pudgy face, and unremarkable figure reinforce the sense of her not "belonging" into the upper class she attempts to "crash." High fashion costuming on her does not look like high fashion on a film star. Instead, Caught's visual treatment of Bel Geddes undermines the ability of Orry-Kelly's New Look ball gown to reassure the audience that her character's move up the class ladder is at all desirable-or revelatory of her true "femininity." There is the sense that the integrity of the character is inevitably attached to the shirtwaist dress, even as her return to Dr. Quinada indicates an appropriate return to her class roots.

"YOU'RE VERY LOVELY -BEAUTIFUL DRESS"

If the heroine's "dress code" in Caught is structured to attach clearly differentiated modes of dress to different sets of social values and sexual hierarchies, so too, costuming plays a very precise role in Letter from an Unknown Woman. Film costuming contributes to Ophuls' analysis of feminine identity in relation to categories of sexuality, gender, and class. The production of meaning through the fashioning of femininity in the latter has a resemblance to Caught in that there are two competing discourses of fashion crystallized around feminine display. Nevertheless, unlike Caught, Letter from an Unknown Woman is a period film, constructed in the mode of a "costume romance" that is a familiar cinematic site of female sexual fantasy (Cook 76).

As in Caught, the identity of the female protagonist, Lisa Berndle (Joan Fontaine), appears to be highly transformative. As I have argued elsewhere, this transformation is superficial, her desire remains remarkably constant. It is also highly masochistic in nature, with characteristics typical of the masochistic victim who is actually in control of her/his suffering (Studlar, "Masochistic" 35-57)· As several feminist scholars have recognized (albeit with different nuances), there is a great deal of masquerade in Letter from an Unknown Woman (Doane, "Abstraction" 74; White 141-44). Lisa Berndle masquerades as an appropriately feminine object of desire, yet, Lisa's so-called compulsion to repeat, or in Stefan's words, to "return to the scenes" of their youth, is driven by her relentless adherence to the logic of masochism. Lisa represents the masochistic subject whose steely determination achieves a triumph of masochistic desire-her own death. As is predictable for a woman's film, this is presented so sympathetically and effectively that audiences (and critics) can respond ?? her as a woman who is "good if merely unfortunate" (Turim, "Psyches" 129). Lisa's masquerade of normative femininity is carefully controlled through costuming to suggest the crucial demarcation made between those moments when she defines her own desire and imposes it onto others and those moments when she is being defined by society in general, and men in particular, as a normative female sexual object. As a result, the heroine may appear to abide by the "norms" of feminine appearance and its relationship to conventional feminine heterosexuality, but the truth of her desire has only a tenuous relationship to her appearance and manner.

In the opening scene of the film, Lisa is introduced as a child of about twelve. She is attired in a shapeless dress with a slightly lowered waist and blouson in a pinpoint (very tiny) "floral" print, lace-cuffed 3/4 sleeve, and round collar. She is on the street in front of her apartment building. She gazes in rapt attention at furniture movers who haul the possessions of a new tenant, Stefan Brand (Louis Jordan), into the building. In voice-over, she notes how this was the day that she was born in the sense of first coming into consciousness.

Her costume in this opening scene is an important one, for it marks her fall into a masochistic and obsessive fascination with Stefan. Lisa first appears as an awkward child, then as a gauche adolescent, who decides to take dancing lessons and to improve her grooming. Susan White remarks that Lisa's "strategic response to her own 'lack'" is to hegin to prepare herself for Stefan Brand, the pianist who has captured her heart and "the attention to clothing is the first of the strategies . . . that serve to deflect the harmful gaze of the others" ( 141 ). Building on psychoanalytic notions of the masquerade of womanliness, White says that the heart of the film is occupied with "Lisa's attempt to wear her sexuality as a toreador wears his cape" (142). This is a wonderful observation, but 1 would modify it slightly to say that what Lisa displays in her "cape" of sexuality is deceptive. Her shifting masquerade of a normative feminine that protects her also is exhibited to disguise her true sexuality and its aggressive masochistic force: What Lisa often "wears" is not her true sexuality: she only exhibits the apparent passive feminine sexuality that society (and presumably Stefan) will find attractive. It is not unexpected then, that Lisa's shifting masquerade of femininity is articulated in costuming that often defines-not her desire, not her femininity as defined by her-but as it is defined by others.

In sunny, boring Linz, Lisa grows up into and is displayed as a marriageable young woman. She appeals as an appropriate mate to a young military man. He sees her as a shy ingénue in an afternoon costume of diaphanous, but proper white. The lieutenant and she walk about the square of Linz and sit down on a bench. He begins to discuss their future. He is obviously in the process of proposing. Lisa's innocent manner, characterized by averted looks and stumbling speech, and her costume's presumed signification of sexual inexperience are suddenly contradicted by an unexpected, shocking declaration. She tells the lieutenant that she is not free to discuss marriage. She is already committed to a man, a composer who lives in Vienna. Even more shocking, she says that her parents do not even know of this situation. Lisa's tale, of course, is an imaginative embellishment on her desire for Stefan, whom she has not seen in years, and who remains unaware of her except as a shy neighbor child. The scene ends with the lieutenant and his uncle abruptly taking their leave of her and her confused parents. Her voice over notes of the latter: "For them, this was the end."

Immediately after this scene, we see Lisa in the process of "dressing" in her role as a model in a Viennese dress shop. She has fled her parents' home in Linz and is on her own. Lisa's experience as a fashion model in Vienna contributes to her acquisition of a more polished and attractive femininity, but her employment at Frau Spitzer's also makes her aware of the sexual expectations attached to women in such a profession. She is regarded as strange for never going out with men. As with Leonora's New Look ball gown assumed for the return of her husband, Lisa is now defined visually by clothing designed to attract the gaze of men. In the fashion shop, the 18905 dresses with their "softly curved shoulders and hourglass figures nipped by corsets" show us why the La Belle Epoque fashion became the inspiration for Dior's credited instigation of the New Look (Cook 53). Off-the-shoulder dresses, White says, are part of Lisa's masquerade in that they connote her "womanliness" (159). They are also indicative of how the film's costume designs for Lisa might have called upon the fashion knowledge of female audiences of 1949. No doubt, many of these women would have recognized how these historically-derived film costumes shared New Look formal characteristics and erotic implications. Lisa's costumes are elegant; she wears "high fashion" unexpectedly well. She is comfortable in expensive, "revealing" clothes in a way that Leonora Eames is not. Through her modeling career, Lisa attracts the male gaze that provides her with an income. It does not, however, provide her with a sexual partner. As we know from the scene in Linz, her imagination has already secured Stefan in that role.

Although Lisa learns in her profession what kind of "look" appeals to men, she does not employ it in the sequence when she stalks Stefan, and he finally sees her in the street, and picks her up for a night on the town. Rather than sustaining the extravagantly erotic off-the-shoulder look that we see her model in Frau Spitzer's shop, her costume in this pivotal scene is extremely circumspect: a black coat, black skirt and white blouse in shirtwaist style with a elevated waistline, slightly peaked or capped sleeves, an asymmetrical black neck-scarf, and small cap/hat. Again, as in Leonora's costuming in scenes with Dr. Quinada, sexual reticence and restraint rather than availability and exhibitionism are suggested. In these scenes, Lisa looks remarkably "charming"a term applied to her more than once in the film. She is youthful but serious, pretty but modest, with the camera enhancing her appearance of sincere ardor in flattering closeups.

No wonder many critics say that Stefan seduces Lisa, for this costuming plays no small part in rendering Lisa "innocent" in her seduction of Stefan (Studlar, "Masochistic" 46-48). Many years later, the lovers will meet again. Lisa is dressed in white for her performance as Johann Stauffer's wife at another performance, that of Mozart's Magic Flute: her glittering gown, pearl necklace, and fur cape, all in white, indicate that she is a beautiful object, a most desirable and elegant woman. Unlike Leonora in Caught, Lisa is capable of acquiring the external signs of fashionable femininity and making them seem her own, at this moment in the film more so than ever. In spite of her social sucr cess, the scene establishes through dialogue that Lisa is not completely satisfied with her life. When her husband asks her whether she is happy, she evades answering him. At the opera, she and Johann sit in a reserved box. This moment corresponds to what Simon de Beauvoir has described in The second Sex: ". . . in her evening dress the wife is disguised as a woman, to serve the pleasure of all males and gratify the pride of her proprietor" (546-47). Stefan is also in the audience. Lisa attracts Stefan's gaze for the first time in the film, which is to be expected since she is now truly modeling herself after the beautiful, upper-class women with whom he had associated when she was a child. She leaves early, but Stefan catches her in the lobby and asks her to meet him. Later, she defies her husband and decides to see Stefan at his apartment.

Significantly, her costume for this rendezvous is one which harkens visually back to what she wore when she first quietly seduced Stefan so many years before. As in that scene, when she calls upon Stefan to "reclaim" him, Lisa is in a long black coat. As White has suggested, her suit has a certain masculine flavor, which is also true of her modified top hat with veil ( 185). Her black silhouette is a more womanly version of her figure when, as a young woman, she stood in the street waiting to attract Stefan's gaze. When she sheds her coat in his apartment, her balloon-sleeved white shirtwaist blouse, with a high, laced collar is very ornate, and appropriate to a woman of her elevated social status. It has some of the romantic quality of the Givenchy's famous postwar blouses. The flower motif recalls the smock with the tiny, pinpoint flower pattern that the child Lisa wore in the opening scene of the film while the white on white stripes on the blouse recall her costume at Linz, as well as the costume she wore on her first meeting with Stefan that led to their one-night stand.

As a consequence, this blouse is a clever visual articulation of Lisa's sexual path to this moment. It rearticulates the modest blouse and skirt she wore in Linz, even recalling the oversize bib at the restaurant that added to her youthful appearance. It is different now because the blouse has acquired a richness in fabric and detail that was missing before. At the same time, the blouse evokes the white/on white stripes of her dress in Linz. Perhaps it may seem exaggerated, but one might say that, looking across the entire film, Lisa's whole history is amalgamated into this blouse, which forms a radically altered variation on both her original child's dress as well as her attire the night when Stefan was hers. Yet, Stefan can no more recognize the meaningfulness of this dress than he recognizes how Lisa has figured in his life. He can compliment its beauty ("You're very lovely-beautiful dress"), but he fails to recognize anything beyond a superficial quality of attractiveness in Lisa's attire, just as he fails to recognize anything more about his attraction to and connection with Lisa.

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The hat that Lisa wears in this scene is also worthy of attention. It could be dismissed as another charming chapeau that flatters the actress/character, but, as noted earlier, it is also a diminutive version of a man's top hat combined with a veil. There is something earnest about it but slightly ridiculous. Yet, the hat also serves a very important narrative function. Stefan will lift its veil to attempt to see more clearly the face of this "new" woman he wishes to seduce. Ophuls photographs this moment of unveiling with a closeup on Lisa. It is a poignant visual revelation of her face to the audience. The lifting of the veil shows Lisa's countenance exhibiting emotional (masochistic) expectancy, but where Lisa expects to see Stefan's recognition of her true identity-as the one who has loved him her entire life-she, of course, finds no reciprocal recognition, only a momentary appreciation for her beauty. She leaves.

The investment of these two Max Ophuls films in the spectacle of costuming in such terms as I have tried to demonstrate suggests a layer of meaning that often intensifies and sometimes modifies the meaning available through other cinematic signifiers. As a result, Caught and Letter from an Unknown Woman demonstrate how their heroines' movement across identity and class boundaries may be mapped through costuming. The shifting and unstable boundaries of feminine identity that call into question stereotypes of patriarchal power relations are actually clarified rather than obscured in these films through sartorial language. This language of costuming is given rhetorical impact within the context of a precisely structured visual argument. To many critics and scholars, costuming is not only "invisible" but also irrelevant. Yet, as these two Max Ophuls' films show us, costuming can be extremely relevant to-and effectively employed in-the cinema to interrogate the construction of femininity in patriarchal society rather than existing merely as an affirmation of the inevitable excesses of conventional female objectification.

University of Michigan