We are proud to present, in collaboration with the Goethe Institut of Boston, this early, rarely seen film by the great German director Max Ophüls, who remains best known for the films he made as an émigré: Letter from an Unknown Woman and La Ronde. A Romeo-and-Juliet story of two champagne-producing families at war whose children become romantically involved, the film is a comedy, shot through with Ophüls’s characteristic irony. A highly cinematic work—unique in this period of transition to sound, which reduced many films to stage-bound productions—The Laughing Heirs employs inventive camera techniques that vividly render the theme of romantic love as a crucial life force.