LOLA MONTES: Blu-ray (Gamma Films, 1955) Criterion
As an
intellectual exercise, using the big top to illustrate a parallel course between
circus performers and the players of life’s grand and highly stylized stage –
triumphs and tragedies blossoming in tandem within this show of shows,
director, Max Ophüls’ Lola Montès (1955) takes dead aim on an uncommon
beauty; alas, to rather deadening levels of hyperbole, wit and sophistication
that, in the final analysis, and despite its uber-slick sheen and
ultra-intercontinental charm, do not entirely add up to a satisfying
entertainment. The indictment of ‘common’ celebrity as an unabashed promotion
of one’s self, wed to an aberrant corruption by others, is well-placed and even
more reverent to today’s pop-u-tainment saturated culture slavishly devoted to
sin and scandals that continue to buoy careers, long ago to have quietly
expired from a deplorable influx of crass commercialism and painfully pervading
ennui. Lola Montès is, in fact,
the tale of a girl who gets around…a lot – her addlepated sexcapades used as festival
fodder to fuel salacious gossip put forth by gawkers, squawkers and talkers.
The real Lola Montez – born Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, Countess of
Landsfeld – a rather ‘plain Jane’, was hardly a little princess, and, in the
end, died of pneumonia – emaciated by syphilis, age 39. But the one we get in
this movie, reborn as the exquisitely handsome Martine Carol, is a tragic
figure made to pay penitence for prior acts of hedonism, put on ‘display’ as a
carnival freak. Lola’s sexual aberrations are of deep fascination to the cuffed
and crinoline sect, sitting in judgment, jeering and leering from the stands. In
the heartrending finale of this failed magnum opus the uncommonly sycophantic
lovers who made Lola Montès what she is today are replaced
by a never-ending line of wannabes, unable to do more than kiss her hands
through the grate of a wooden parapet, designed to keep Europe’s most notorious
woman a prisoner of her own image for the rest of her days.
When it
premiered in 1955, Lola Montès was, arguably, not the movie Max Ophüls
wanted audiences to see; his masterwork taken to task by the studio without his
permission and re-cut in a more linear fashion. This, alas, completely destroyed
its delicately perched flashback narrative; the pieces of the mobile no longer
dangled around ‘the lady’ in question, but rather unevenly moving ahead
through a series of truncated vignettes, capped off by the grand finale – a swan
dive from a trapeze not even the most experienced acrobats should survive (but
this hellcat with more than nine lives does). In point of fact, Annette Wademant’s
screenplay remains fairly faithful to the facts – or, at least the rumors and innuendo about Montez’s real-life escapades; her artificially inflated ‘fame’ as a Spanish
dancer, and, courtesan/mistress to Bavaria’s King Ludwig I (played with unusual
soft sentiment and hard-of-hearing charm by Anton Walbrook). Through Ludwig’s
auspices, this unexceptional creature of habits became Countess of Landsfeld,
using her influence upon the Crown to institute reforms, ultimate to lead the
nation into a revolt in 1848. Where Wademant’s interpretation differs is in the
particulars of this Montès’ youth; seemingly unloved by her widowed
mother, Mrs. Craigie (Lise Delamare), whose lover, Lieutenant
Thomas James (Ivan Desny) she willfully steals, only to realize that life with
a boozing womanizer is no life at all. From this rather inauspicious debut into
womanhood, Lola evolves a reputation for using men – famed composer, Franz Liszt
(Will Quadflieg) among her many conquests. He rather obsequiously thanks her for
allowing him to believe he is the one leaving their relationship.
Fleeing Bavaria,
Lola seduces a young student protester (Oskar Werner) who, as her ever-devoted
maid, Josephine (Paulette Dubost) remain her most loyal supporter. After
revolution spreads, this boy ushers Lola out of the country to relative safety.
Somewhere between these moments of peril, Lola makes quite a splash, assaulting
her lover, Claudio Pirotto (Claude Pinoteau)
in public while he is conducting his orchestra, and, even more brazenly,
accosting his wife, returning the jewel-encrusted broach he gave to her that Lola
suggests is ‘pure junk’, while claiming for all to hear that she did not know Pirotto
was married. Her audacious declaration
draws spontaneous applause from stunned bystanders and inadvertently leads to
an introduction with Peter Ustinov’s steely-eyed circus master – a brazen and
cold-hearted promoter, for whom the salacious Montès now holds a particular
fascination. He reminds her of the potency of scandal – properly exploited –
knowing no boundaries. In America in particular, it is the coin of the realm,
necessary to achieve infamy and success. Lola spurns the offer - at first - but
eventually succumbs from necessity, after her fortunes are lost in the tumult
of the revolution.
It is a minor
pity Max Ophüls chose to so heavily concentrate on the circus milieu as his
centerpiece, rather than tell a more straight-forward tale of the wickedly enterprising
Montez, a half-wild creature of polarizing tastes and temperament. Rumored to
have run through the streets of Scotland naked, this Montez eloped with James
at the tender age of sixteen, and, became the purveyor of the scandalous tarantella
as a ‘professional’ ‘Spanish’ dancer barely five years later, buoyed by her
aforementioned affair with Liszt, who introduced Lola to Bohemian literary
society and Alexandre Dumas, with whom she is also rumored to have had a
dalliance. Alas, there is no mention of this backstory, nor Montez’s affair du Coeur
with Parisian newspaper magnet/drama critic, Alexandre Dujarier; nor Dujarier offence
to Jean-Bapiste Rosemond de Beauvallon who shot and killed Dujarier in a subsequent
duel in her honor. There is also nothing of George Trafford Heald, the army
cornet whom Montez illegally wed for his inheritance, but was then forced to
flee in order to escape a charge of bigamy. Instead, the picture concentrates
rather heavily on Ustinov’s brilliantly envisaged Master of Ceremonies,
cracking his whip with inflections of punctuated dialogue, tripping rather
loosely over the garish gloss of his show and introducing us to various
vignettes that exorcise Montès’ demons – some, barefacedly invented to further
embellish the folly. Nevertheless, the influence exerted by Lola Montès –
the movie – on contemporary film-makers cannot be overstated. In many ways, Baz
Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001) seems to rather brazenly riff on its
ethers.
With all due
respect to critic, Andrew Sarris, I will stop considerably short of labeling Ophüls’
heretical and baroque picture “the greatest movie ever made”, despite
the director’s surreal and highly stylized audacity – rather contrarily, to
have shot his picture in the vast expanses of Cinemascope (and always giving us
something peculiar and spellbinding to look at), yet, recurrently cropping the
image with black borders to conform to the traditional ‘academy’ ratio of 1.33:1.
As far as I can tell, this forced shrinkage of the exposed image serves no
purpose except to concentrate the viewers’ gaze on a particular movement within
a scene; at best, applied as a visual gimmick, it nevertheless detracts from
our concentration on the story itself. The motif of a carnival, with its
playful cast of eccentrics, subverted by Ophüls’ emphasis on an unsettling
plague bound to destiny and fate, this Lola Montès emerges as a
salacious piece of super kitsch with a stark and unsettling message about
wickedness and its polarizing popularity, all of it wrapped in the enigma of a coarse
and ever-revolving paradigm, mercilessly clinging to life’s perverted pageantry. What can I tell you? The wicked excite
us. The bigger the rogue, the better the
tale, or – at least – the intrigue.
Despite its
loftier claims to be based on a literary work, Lola Montés originated
with Gamma Films - not novelist, Cécil Saint-Laurent, writing under the
nom-de-plume of Jacques Laurent. Hired
by the producers to author the screenplay, Saint-Laurent’s efforts were passed
over by Ophüls. But the cache of her best-selling reputation remained ensconced
in the film’s title credits, advertising its basis in a novel that, in reality,
never existed. Martine Carol’s participation raised the movie’s budget from $2
to $8 million – the most expensive European movie made since WWII. And Ophüls, apart from his salary, received a
sizable bonus to shoot in Cinemascope (his only work in the widescreen format).
Lola Montés was shot simultaneously in three dubbed versions – French,
German and English, to appeal to the broadest international market. Ophüls, labored
over what was to evolve into his queerly unsettling tragi-comedic operetta, skating
on the edge of a neorealist nightmare with his extraordinarily crammed mise-en-scene
intricately concocted in overwrought spectacle. If anything, immediately following the picture’s
premiere, the auteur theorists in film criticism fixated on Lola Montès,
chiefly for the stormy relationship Ophüls had had with
his producers while making it, and, seemingly ‘his triumph’ to see this
startling original vision through, despite their narrow-mindedness. A beloved
of the collected critics toiling at Cahiers du cinema, no less an
authority than François Truffaut was gushing in his praising of both the
director and this, his last offspring, writing “…there are films that demand
undivided attention. Lola Montès is one of them.” For decades
following its meteoric artistic and financial implosion, the ‘original’ Ophüls’ cut of Lola Montès – rarely seen – was considered the
holy grail for cinephiles, seemingly lost to the ages via neglect and rank
disregard by its distributors as nothing more ambitious than a costly flop. Rumors
of a 140-min. pre-screened version proved to be just that. But after years of
only being able to experience the 96 min. bastardization of Ophüls’ 116-min.
German cut, the director’s son, Marcel proclaimed that the 110-min. French edit
was ‘the definitive’ version of his late father’s masterpiece. Arguably, Lola
Montès was always just a little too ahead of its time to be fully
appreciated for its finely-honed menagerie of peculiarities and pleasures. This
remains true of the picture’s reputation to this day; Ophüls’ desire, his
highly stylized beguilement with this decidedly debauched life, outweighing the
actual myriad of treasures the picture neither yields completely, nor allows
the first-time viewer anywhere near to plum and haunt our depths with its perplexedly
troubled lost – and suspiciously absent soul.
For this
Criterion edition, Lola Montès has been ‘restored’ in 2.55:1 Cinemascope
with its original magnetic 4-track stereo repurposed and sweetened. The results
are uneven, exacerbated by the picture’s troubled history, the limitations of
early ‘scope’ cinematography, and Eastmancolor film stock, neither to reproduce
all the colors of the rainbow, and, even more insidiously to suffer severe
fading and vinegar syndrome not even a handful of years after its initial
photochemical processing. Add to these dilemmas, a version of the picture only
possible by cobbling together bits and pieces, thanks to producer, Pierre
Braunberger, who began an aggressive acquisition of all extant elements from
various sources, printing up internegatives from positive separations, and…well…it
is a wonder Lola Montès on Blu-ray looks as good as it does. Braunberger,
who died in 1990, would not live to see the fullness of his archival research
realized. But his daughter, Laurence, continued the restoration saga with
funding from Thomson Foundation for Film and Television Heritage, the
Franco-American Cultural Fund, and, the Cinematheque francaise. Digitizing an incomplete negative, a rough
cut, YCM B&W color separations, and, an extremely faded and incomplete
exhibition print, Lola Montès underwent a meticulous frame-by frame
digital restoration thereafter, necessitating the removal of a barrage of
age-related damage and artifacts. Mercifully, the arduous process was
immeasurably aided by Max Ophüls’ original production notes, meticulously detailing
his use of color. While far from perfect, this new Blu is likely the most ‘optimal’
viewing opportunity future generations will have to judge the movie for themselves.
Unfortunately, there is only so much even today’s technology can do. Hence,
parts of Lola Montès remain exceptionally grainy, softly focused and wan
in their colors. Contrast is, at times, blown out with a sustained loss of fine
detail. While many sequences yield an impressive palette with optimal clarity
and contrast, as many suffer from these ravages brought on by neglect that no
amount of digital humpty-dumpty-ing can fix. The audio here has been derived
from extant 6-track magnetic stereo masters and enjoys remarkable clarity,
while occasionally impeded by a marginally strident texture.
Criterion has
padded out the extras with a comprehensive audio commentary by scholar, Susan
White, who delves deeply into the picture’s troubled production history. We
also get ‘Max Ophuls ou le Plaisir de tourner’ – a 1965 episode
of French television’s Cineastes de notre temps, in which Ophuls and
various collaborators intellectually discuss their art. Max by Marcel
is a fascinating look at Ophuls’ life’s work, produced exclusively for this
release, and, lovingly explored by his son. We also have silent camera test
footage of Martine Carol appearing in various costumes, hair and make-up tests,
and, a trailer produced for Rialto Picture’s theatrical re-issue of the newly
restored picture. Finally, Gary Giddins weighs in with a superb essay printed
in booklet form. Bottom line: Lola Montès is a movie that defies an
easily digestible experience. Rather transparently devised to make us think,
the art in its story-telling gets occasionally lost in Ophuls’ highbrow
reinterpretations of the real Lola Montez. This Blu-ray provides a slightly problematic
and uneven viewing experience. That said, this is likely the best Lola Montès will ever look
on home video. So, judge and buy according.
FILM RATING (out
of 5 – 5 being the best)
3
VIDEO/AUDIO
3
EXTRAS
3
Comments