GERMAN-BORN director Max Ophüls spent the last and most productive years of his short life (he died at 54) making films in France. His exceptional run of camera-circling, emotions-parsing black-and-white marvels included La ronde (1950), the magnificent Le plaisir (1952) and Madame de … (1953). Unfortunately, his last film, Lola Montès (1955), was almost literally the death of him. Cutting against all his instincts, Ophüls was talked into making this loose biography of the scandalous mid-19th-century courtesan who dallied with Franz Liszt and Ludwig I of Bavaria among many others. Switching to Technicolor and CinemaScope, shooting in German, English and French simultaneously for release in different countries and forced to cast Martine Carol (a ample-bosomed French star of the 1950s) all contributed to a tortured production that culminated in a disastrous premiere and subsequent butchering of the available prints.
This gorgeous Criterion set presents the full restoration (done in 2006) of the film, including Ophüls’ chronologically fractured narrative structure. Ophüls’ primary invention is to set the story within the frame of an enormous circus act, as the once-famous Lola is forced to earn her living by selling her status as a celebrity to a ravenous crowd. An imperious ringmaster (Peter Ustinov in his best role) presides over this extraordinary (media) circus, declaring for the voyeuristic edification of the crowd that he will tell them “the truth, nothing but the truth” about Lola. Of course, his version falls far short of the truth, which we see in flashbacks from Lola’s perspective, as she moves from a brutish husband to artistic, rich and powerful lovers, ending up with the king of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook, the impresario from The Red Shoes). This last affair is her undoing as the peasantry revolts against their monarch for his indiscretions (impeachment headings, apparently, being off the table in Bavaria).
The circus scenes are the best part, full of carefully choreographed legions of tumblers, horseback riders, clowns and tightrope walkers. Huge chandeliers descend from the top of the very, very, big big top. Lola is displayed like a hunk of trussed-up trophy, bathed in garish colored spotlights on rotating stages—Ophüls here anticipates the worst excesses of the paparazzi era to come. In a marvelous scene, Lola swings and climbs her way up a series of ladders. As the ringmaster recounts her rise in society, she ascends to a distant platform from which she will perform a swan dive, the inevitable fall from grace that awaits every celebrity. This unbroken tracking shot shows off Ophüls’ trademark fluid eye at its most breathtaking.
The DVD comes with two documentaries boasting many interviews with Ophüls collaborators. Ustinov makes an astute observation about Carol: “The worse she is, the better for us [with her] completely blank personality.” Ophüls’ son, Marcel, recounts some of the difficulties with the production, which started with shady producers who may have had Mafia connections, and went on to a revolt by the union musicians on the circus set and a nightmarish opening night in which disgruntled audience members left early and told people waiting in line for the next showing not to bother. According to Marcel, “Afterward, [Max] went to a sanitarium. He fell ill because of this insane film.”
LOLA MONTÈS; two discs; Criterion; $39.95
