Max Ophuls

Aiming to follow in his father’s swashbuckling footsteps, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. bought the rights to the 1926 book “His Majesty, the King: A Romantic Love Chase of the Seventeenth Century” by Cosmo Hamilton in 1941.

It was August 1945 and in his two-story house on Whitley Terrace in the Hollywood Hills, Max Ophüls had started writing a personal bio at the request of a publicist for the company that had finally hired him after four years of unemployment. Like many of his European colleagues before him, the German-born and French-naturalized filmmaker had moved to America in 1941, hoping to find work in Tinseltown.