Boulevard comedy meets social satire as three dead men observe the bitter struggle of Annette – the woman they all loved and who led each to their doom – as she tries to force her daughter into an arranged marriage. Out of this slight, macabre material, Ophuls fashions a poignant meditation on time that seesaws poetically between past and present, the dead and the living. Softening the overt misogyny of the source material, Ophuls insists that Annette’s ferocity towards the men in her life stems from her own arranged marriage. Little-seen today, Tender Enemy remained one of Ophuls' personal favorites among his pre-war French films.