Joan Fontaine's 1948 bid for the Academy Award, "Letter From An Unknown Woman," teeters perilously close to the brink of complete bathos for the better part of two hours, but it never quite falls in. Set in the Vienna of 1900, it concerns the lifelong passion of a pretty girl for a rather stupid young composer, played woodenly by Louis Jourdan. Miss Fontaine gazes lovingly at Jourdan while she is a child, and when she has grown up, runs away from home for a romantic one-night spree with him. He subsequently takes a trip, and after he has left, she finds that she is pregnant. Not wishing to hurt him, she delivers her baby but refuses to divulge the name of the father.

The years pass, she marries a rich nobleman, and then bumps into Jourdan at the opera. Although the interim is supposed to be nine years, neither Miss Fontaine nor Jourdan have changed at all, so the audience is just as surprised as the heroine that he doesn't remember her. She tries to remind him but he remains buffaloed. Soon thereafter the son dies and, as she feels herself dying too, she pens him a long, long letter.

The whole movie consists of flashbacks while Jourdan reads this letter. Having only known her for one night many years before, he is naturally startled to learn that she has loved him all her life, that he had a son, and that he has provided the plot for an extremely complicated movie. Incidentally, the letter starts: "By the time you get this I will probably be dead," which is enough to shake a stronger man's nerve. His conscience hurts him, so he goes out to fight the duel with her husband from which he had been planning to run before he read the letter. The moral of this decision is not quite clear, but one gets the impression that he spent so much time reading the letter that he missed his train. Presumably he gets killed, but the audience never finds out.

Miss Fontaine, in her performance of a girl whose shyness is pitiful to watch, is the best part of this movie. She spends a great deal of time listening entranced to Jourdan's piano playing and hiding behind curtains and doors, but manages to smile wistfully, even while sinning.

Jourdan's acting is even less convincing than his peculiar role, that of a forgetful, confused, rich and good-looking Viennese composer. He lives in an apartment that would have made Johann Strauss' mouth water. The background of Vienna looks convincing, the supporting cast does fairly well, and if the plot, taken from a novel by Stefan Zweig but curiously reminiscent of "The Constant Nymph," were not so contrived, "Letter From An Unknown Woman" would come close to being a grade "B" picture.