* WHERE: Tower Theatre.

* WHEN: Opens today.

* RATING: Not rated, but probably PG for mature themes and mild violence.

* RUNNING TIME: 105 minutes; in French with subtitles.

* BOTTOM LINE: Max Ophüls' classic love triangle reveals emotional despair below glittering surfaces.

The director Max Ophüls was one of the last great classical stylists of European film, and his smooth tracking shots and opulent surfaces were the very things the French New Wave railed against when they championed the cinéma-vérité approach.

Ophüls' skill for creating glittering surfaces, and then plunging to the emotional core beneath them, is on full display in his 1953 drama "The Earrings of Madame De . . .," which returns in a nicely remastered print.

Played by Danielle Darrieux, the Countess Louise de . . . (Ophüls, ever the gentleman, never reveals her last name) is in money trouble, and doesn't want her husband, an Army general played by Charles Boyer, to find out. She goes to her jeweler to resell a pair of diamond earrings - a wedding present from the general - to pay off her debt.

Ophüls then follows the earrings' trajectory through the lives of those who own them. The jeweler blabs to the general, who buys back the earrings and gives them to his mistress, who is leaving Vienna for Constantinople. She sells them to pay off gambling debts in Constantinople, which is where the Baron Fabrizio Donati (Vittorio de Sica) buys them. Donati soon arrives in Vienna and takes a lover: The Countess.

The ensuing love triangle allows Ophüls to comment on the value of love - how the earrings turn from dispensible bauble to priceless symbol, depending on the giver - and the shallow amorality of the aristocracy. He also draws achingly tender performances from Boyer as the cold-hearted general, de Sica as the too-trusting Baron, and especially Darrieux as the Countess as she learns too late the price of toying with others' affections.

But it's the fluidity of Ophüls' camera, swirling through ballroom dances past the candlelit glitter, that makes "The Earrings of Madame De . . ." truly glow. By focusing so intently on the aristocracy's well-maintained surfaces, he finds the emptiness beneath.

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* SEAN P. MEANS can be reached at movies@sltrib.com or 801-257-8602. Send comments to livingeditor@sltrib.com.