THE CMJ PREVIEW | OCTOBER 15-21
Lola Montes (1955)
Directed by Max Ophuls

Max Ophüls’ Lola Montès: the cinematic analog to Charlie Parker with Strings or, better yet, the second movement of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32 (when a whimsical 19th-century sway glides into a heavy ragtime swing, long before such a genre was even around). Like those two musical works, Lola Montès is a near perfect marriage of classicism and modernism. The real-life rise and fall of an aristocratic femme fatale who ends up as a circus attraction (literally), the film’s formal elegance has rarely been matched, and yet the borders of its expansive CinemaScope frame can scarcely contain the director’s kinetic visuals. With every frame saturated with unreasonable grandeur, Lola Montès is nothing short of an Ophüls-explosion.

While still in high critical esteem, Ophüls seems to have fallen out of vogue. Unlike Douglas Sirk (whose self-conscious subversion to melodrama has helped find new generations of appreciators), Ophüls never winks at his audience. But beneath the poise and formality there is a wealth of humor, terror and humanity, not to mention playful cinematic invention. Until recently, only one film of his was available on DVD (actually, a maliciously bad print of Lola). Along with Criterion’s new DVD releases of La Ronde, Le Plaisir, and Madame de…, Rialto Pictures’ glorious restoration of Lola Montès finally gives Max Ophüls the royal treatment his work deserves.