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Recent videocassette releases, reviewed by Times critics.

**** “Letter From an Unknown Woman.” Republic. $19.95. 1948.

A handsome, dissolute classical pianist returns home from a night of revelry. In the morning, he faces a duel, which he intends to avoid by hastily decamping from the city: Vienna, at its fin de siecle apogee. As he makes his preparations, sardonically amused, his mute servant hands him a letter that will plunge him into a world of memory, desire, hopeless love, his own callous past, the poignancy of dreams and, ultimately, tragedy. With Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan, based on Stefan Zweig’s novella, scripted by Howard Koch and directed by Max Ophuls (with a mixture of Viennese urbanity, cynicism and compassion), this 1947 classic is probably the greatest romantic movie ever to emerge from the Hollywood studios. Ophuls’ voluptuous style--with Franz Planer’s camera forever tracking up and down staircases, across streets, through ballrooms and cabarets, following or leading the lovers on their paths of lyrical doom--creates a sensation of vertigo, beauty, desperate loss. The film is lovely, intoxicating. And it breaks you heart.