ABOUT TOWN: 1 Night, 1 Diva, 3 Roles

Max Ophuls' "Lola Montez" (1955), which is at The New York Film Festival and subsequently being revived at Film Forum (Oct. 10-30) in a spectacularly restored 35mm print, has been hailed by some as the greatest film of all time. Re-seeing it after many years, this critic begs to differ -- it's not a patch on real Ophuls masterworks like "The Earrings of Madame De," "Letter from an Unknown Woman," or "Caught."

Although visually stunning, the script is airlessly clever, cursory, and completely lacking in emotional depth -- but the real problem is its star. Martine Carol, the pudding-faced French sexpot Ophuls was forced to work with, totally lacks the charisma or sensitivity that an actress like Vivien Leigh, playing another historical seductress, Emma Hamilton, in "That Hamilton Woman," had in such spades that, in a matter of seconds, anyone succumbed.

Even Carol's costumes, which, in any other Ophuls film, would have been sublime, as done by Marcel Escoffier (also responsible for some of the monstrosities Joan Sutherland wore in opera) instead of Ophuls' usual, brilliant collaborator, Georges Annenkov, are pedestrian when not downright vulgar. Ergo, the film is like a beautiful setting with a paste gem at its center, to be seen for the extraordinary circus framing device -- which must have influenced Bob Fosse's "Cabaret" -- but definitely something to be puzzled over afterwards in the crisp autumn air.