I'm sorry you interpret discussion and disagreement as anger.

Take a look at this (evidently) Australian web site, detailing the long and tormented censorship history of Salo:

http://www.refused-classification.com/Films_Salo.htm

No need to belabor the point, but the words "ban" and "banned" come up again and again, from both attackers and defenders of the film. It appears Salo could be shown in public between 1993 (when newspaper ads announced: BANNED IN AUSTRALIA FOR 17 YEARS) and 1998, when the Review Board "re-banned" the film (not my phrase). The censorship board also refused Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man at some point, WTF was up with that?

Evidently Salo became a right-wing hot-button issue during that time, with conservative legislators successfully linking the movie to a mini-epidemic of pedophile crimes, at least in their own minds. Much of the debate was moronic and tedious, but we'd get that too if government had any control over the dissemination of cultural works. They pretty much don't, at least not so far.

An appeal to allow Salo was rejected in 2003, and in the words of Office of Film & Literature head Des Clark, "the ban remains in force." BTW I was wrong in saying that they haven't been ripping open packages -- as recently as 2002 two imported British DVDs of Salo were seized by Australian customs officials.

... the Salo DVD was again "refused classification" just this year, and journalist Paul Syvret of the (Brisbane) Courier-Mail wrote a column on July 19 protesting the decision: "Beyond the likes of child pornography (which Salo is not), animal cruelty and snuff films, it beggars belief in the age of the Internet that we even bother banning films in the first place."

Screaming? You misremember. There isn't any screaming in that last, or second-last scene. You can't hear anything from what's happening outside. The soundtrack is entirely music, first Orff's Carmina Burana, then a dance-band version of "These Foolish Things." It's particularly effective.

Listen, I'm grateful for the response. My job at this-here librul website is to "start conversations," and I'm a happy camper when that happens.

Honestly, I have no beef with Ophuls at all, and I am so totally not saying that he and/or Lola are "not that good." Well, OK, to be fair, I am expressing some mild reservations about Lola, which I think is beautiful but flawed and artificial even by Ophuls' standards, and has been critically overrated because of its tormented history and the status of its defenders. (I totally get where Max was going with the chopped-up chronology, but I do question how well it works in this case.)

I have no hesitation in grouping Ophuls with the big-name Euro directors I mentioned at the end. Earrings and La Ronde are masterpieces of a certain type, Lola is certainly an important film (if not the greatest ever made), and his Hollywood and '30s European films (not that I've seen all of the latter) are definitely worth seeing.

The fairest thing to say is that I am expressing personal reservations which may well be questions of taste and temperament (mine and his, and yours too, I guess). It's abundantly clear to me that other people's mileage will vary. I certainly don't begrudge you or Sarris or anybody else the delight you find in Ophuls. I find it too, in places. Earrings is great but La Ronde is probably my favorite; I think it's a near-perfect balance of his lighter, more comic side with his more philosophical and even experimental leanings.

But notice the number of posters who seem to be well informed about film history but don't know Ophuls and his work. There are reasons why he's become obscure, both fair and unfair ones. (The DVDs now reaching the market, with Lola and others soon to follow, may change that to some degree.)

As I've said, I think it's tough for contemporary viewers to "read" the social codes or see through the Viennese and/or Parisian pastry coating in Ophuls, a man of the mid-20th-century who is (mostly) reflecting back on the mores of a vanished world, one that, at best, he glimpsed as a child. (He was born in 1902 in Saarbrucken, in western Germany; his father was a wealthy department-store proprietor.) It's difficult for me, at least; I'm not pointing fingers. I would concede all your points about the potential modern relevance or philosophical depth in Ophuls, but you have to be pretty steeped in the dramatic and cinematic conventions of '30s and '40s movies to see it, I think. (My wife tried to watch La Ronde with me, found it boring and stilted, and bailed out after 10 minutes. She liked Earrings pretty well.)

The way I put it at the end expresses my own idiosyncratic reaction, of course. That's all I've got. (As Sarris says so beautifully, it's all he's got too.) I would elaborate this way: I can see why people love Ophuls, and I can see the argument that he may be more important to subsequent film history -- say, to the American film tradition -- than Bergman or Renoir is.

But Rules of the Game or Smiles of a Summer Night -- two movies not too far away from Ophuls' universe -- feel modern and immediate to me, and emotionally accessible, in a way Ophuls often doesn't. That's not some categorical or definitive judgment, of course, but I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. There's a whole can of worms here I'm avoiding, about storytelling that foregrounds the image (somebody once described Ophuls as "writing with the camera") vs. storytelling that foregrounds the text or the characters or the ideas. And I'm not actually sure how useful it is to describe, say, Ophuls and Bergman as being on opposite sides of that divide. You could, but then again ... let's leave that for another time.