Lola Montes
Directed by Max Ophuls

This is the second time that the program director has selected Max Ophüls's last film, Lola Montes, for showing at the New York Film Festival. At the first festival in 1963, while the main event was being held at Philharmonic Hall, the 1955 movie was screened at the Museum of Modern Art as part of a series devoted to films that had been overlooked in American commercial release.

Last night Lola Montes finally made it to Philharmonic Hall. It is such an extraordinary movie, a movie-movie, in effect, that its repeat showing is worth the risks involved in the rather dubious precedent set. It is not only Ophüls's last film (he died in 1957), but it is also an eye-expanding summation of the lush, romantic style.

Ophüls makes the story of Lola Montes (Martine Carol), the successful nineteenth-century courtesan (if only so-so Spanish fandango dancer), into a visually dazzling, ironic commentary on celebrity. It is set in the frame of a gaudy American circus where Lola is not the sideshow, but the main event, a sort of big time Evelyn Nesbitt who, in a series of opulent tableaux vivants, reenacts the high points of her life (principally, her love affairs) while she remembers the actual events. Thus, curiously, the carnival is real; the actual events are fantasy.

The late Miss Carol, with her hair dyed jet black, is a cold, stony-faced sphinx throughout, but I'm not sure this really detracts from the movie, which is really a tableau in itself. Ophüls did such flamboyant things with his CinemaScope color camera that the ripely romantic spell might have been broken by a more human presence.

A very young Peter Ustinov is fine as the ever-so-lightly malignant circus master and a very young Oskar Werner is good as one of Lola's lovers, a student who spirits her out of Bavaria, which is in a state of revolution largely of her causing.