Lola Montès

... 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

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

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Of all movies that appear here and there in lists of greatest movies of all-time Lola Montès is the most criticized. Ranked by some as one of the 10 greatest, the movie suffers from some slow scenes and a wooden-acted protagonist played by Martine Carol. But the overall effect is mesmerizing. Cinema´s history isn´t made only of perfect movies.

It is the only color movie that Max Ophüls directed and the last of his career. You could only imagine the genius he would be in color films. The circus that links all the facts is a example of decadence in its greens and reds that many advertising-style filmmakers would kill for to get the same effect to show beauty. Ophüls is subtle and the most elegant director that has ever lived. He is one of the fundamental cinema masters (in the same category of Griffith, Chaplin, Eisenstein, Buñuel, Renoir, Welles, Bergman, Ford, Hitchcock, Wilder, Visconti, Mizoguchi, Truffaut, etc) and probably the less seen of them.

Lola Montès received poor critics at the time of its release but was recognized as great art and a summing up of Ophüls´ themes by the French nouvelle vague critics. You find in it some interesting comments about the way the society created by men destroy women and their paths to happiness. Ophüls was an author not a historian. He wasn´t interested in Lola as a historic figure but as a celebrity humiliated by her public just because she tried to be free. Ophüls has decided to make the movie after noticing how press used to treat the crisis of Judy Garland and Zsa Zsa Gabor affairs.

If you want to see other incredible films of the director watch to Libelei, Letter from an Unknown Woman and La Ronde.

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.

Baz Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge!" owes something to Lola Montes.

The movie has its moments -- it worked for me as a meditation on the exploitation of love, and the exploitation of despair. Some have commented on the wooden Martine Carol performance, but I thought that was the point. Lola Montes is a blank slate onto whom her admirers project what they want to see. She's vibrant and captivating only to men who want her. And why do they want her? The endless stream of men willing to pay a dollar to kiss her hand -- they want her only because so many other men have wanted her, famous men. It's not about getting a piece of Lola the person, it's about getting a piece of Lola the brand. She's a product (in a cage!) marketed by Ustinov. They have a creepily symbiotic relationship -- the huckster needs his product, and the product needs to be sold.

Before she sells out to Ustinov, Lola lives for love, exploits it for all she's worth, and is exploited for all she's worth. In despair, she turns to Ustinov's show, where she daily and literally recreates her fall from the heights of romance to the tawdry center ring, where her life is exposed to question and ridicule from the cheap seats.

Not a bad flick. I thought the cheesy storytelling techniques -- the flashbacks, the elements of predictability (of course she's going to meet the King of Germany) her "dangerously weak heart" and the concerned doctor -- were ham handed by design, slyly self-mocking. Lola Montes is a movie worth seeing and thinking about.