Lola Montès

In the Nineteenth Century, the Irish born dancer Lola Montès (Martine Carol) was the lover of many famous men, including Franz Liszt and the King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who made her Countess of Landsfeld. With a revolutionary movement, she flees from Munich and travels to the United States of America. She is hired by the Circus Master (Peter Ustinov) that tells her scandalous love affairs in every show and she becomes the lead attraction of the circus.

"Lola Montès" is not my favorite Max Ophüls film, but it is certainly his best work of cinematography, costumes and art decoration. The restored DVD highlights these aspects and it recalls Luchino Visconti style. However, the narrative of the life of the most scandalous European woman of the Nineteenth Century is tiresome in many moments. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Lola Montèz"

If a film were purely spectacle and music, I would give this a 10. Unfortunately, the lack of charisma of the principle actress makes it hard to sit through. It is a series of vignettes offered to attendees of a circus where Miss Montes answers questions for a quarter and lets her hand be kissed for a dollar (the French exchange rate comes into play, of course). The movie is nice to look at with rich colors and interesting circus scenes. I wonder if the film has been worked on because it literally glows. It's the self importance of Carol and the tiresome people who seem to bring it down a bit. I never felt sympathy for her character; her arbitrariness just lost me. Franz Liszt looks like the second place winner in a Fabio look-alike contest. Then we are to feel great sorrow for her because she needs to stay in a dormitory for a short time on an ocean voyage. Because she feels slighted, she begins to get this crust about her and begin to use people. She is a courtesan in the true sense. Carol just doesn't work. Now Marlene Dietrich. There you go. Ophuls is interesting and this was his last film. It's certainly eye candy.

This movie made me wish Max Ophüls would had made more color movies during his career. This is the only color movie he did and the last movie he completed as well, after passing away way too early in 1957. It's a beautiful, colorful looking movie, that has some of the usual typical Max Ophüls ingredients in it as well.

I can definitely understand people finding Max Ophüls boring ones to watch. They are not just movies for just everybody, especially not for todays usual type of audience. Luckily the majority of people still seem to be able to appreciate his movies and his more slow but very stylish and strong way of story-telling.

It's narrative is probably the movie its strongest point. It isn't necessarily the story itself this time that makes this movie stand out. It's a movie that follows a plot-line set in the present, combined with another story, that of Lola Montès life, told in flashbacks. It's an approach that works out so well and interesting for the movie.

I wouldn't exactly call this movie a real biopic, since it only focuses on some of the early years of Lola Montès her life. In all honesty, I think her real life and character was much more interesting and complex than the one that is being told in this movie but that would had simply made an entire different movie. So it really doesn't matter that this movie takes a lot of liberties and only tells a small part of Lola Montès her entire lifespan. This was simply not the approach that had been chosen by Max Ophüls, who simply tried to tell a good, compelling, compact story, about an intriguing woman. Max Ophüls always seemed to have had a fascination for female behavior and especially for those that didn't simply went with the flow and did other things than were expected from them. He did this even with movies that were about simple housewives and was not afraid to show people how they often really are and that not everything is always black and white in life.

Like basically every big Max Ophüls movie, this one is a period piece, which means that is has some great looking sets and costumes, that this time even catch more attention, since it got all shot in color. But that doesn't mean that it distracts from the story or all of the other typical Max Ophüls elements that make most of his movie so incredibly effective and compelling to watch, with this one included.

8/10

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Max Ophuls' final film, which I viewed in its restored German version, is quite the visual onslaught in widescreen - the extravagant framing device depicting the historic bed-hopper as a circus 'freak' among many, many acrobats and jugglers is the work of someone slaving feverishly to dazzle us. The distanced spectacle sucks us in, and it all looks great, but the toil of the film-making efforts end up deflecting attention from Lola herself - maybe Martine Carol isn't up for the job like everyone says, but more importantly all that metaphor stuff seems to crowd out time she could use to draw us in. The dalliance in the palace through the third act supplies Ophuls' requisite plot disfigurement - everything I've seen except Madame De... has SOME kind of unsatisfying ding in the arc. And the 'sumptuous' color compositions - which are pretty overwhelming in and of themselves, especially when the restoration is working from top sources - seem to limit the opportunities for the big Ophuls Camera Swoops that usually lively things up.

... she doesn't get it here and it is difficult to know where she WOULD get it. Max Ophuls was one of if not THE most elegant director who ever looked thru a viewfinder whilst conversely Martine Carol was one of the most wooden performers since Laurence Harvey so what we're left with is a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. They were never going to cram all the events of Lola's life into even a four-hour movie, all the more surprising since she was dead at 40 and squeezed all her scandalous living into just over half that time. Ophuls, master of black and white story telling opted for color in what turned out to be his last film and we can only speculate by how far he would have eclipsed say Minelli had he lived. What emerges thru all the truncated and reconstructed versions is little more than a blueprint for a masterpiece manque. 7/10