Director: Max Ophüls

(1955) In a garishly colored circus, the suckers line up at a buck a kiss with that celebrated adventuress Lola (French sex symbol Martine Carol), as ringmaster Peter Ustinov starts his spiel and the flashbacks begin. Ophüls’ first movie in color and widescreen was the biggest-budgeted French film to date, with his always-mobile camera gliding, tilting, and craning amid dazzling sets and costumes, as the oscillation between the tawdriness of the circus and the romanticism of flashbacks underscores the difference between reality and memory, each flashback with its own color scheme: for Lola’s youth, black-blue-grey; for her affair with 19th century “rock star” Franz Liszt, red and gold; and for her amour with the King of Bavaria (The Red Shoes’ Anton Walbrook), white, blue, silver and gold. Disliking the newfangled CinemaScope screen, Ophüls broke it up with pillars, curtains, arches — note the hanging rope dangling down amidst the mise en scène of Lola’s backstage interview with the king. Ophüls’ final work, and arguably the masterpiece of a career that encompassed films in five different languages, Lola was a flop on first release and subjected to a brutal butchering by its producers — they even hacked up the original negative. After their eventual bankruptcy, legendary New Wave producer Pierre Braunberger acquired the rights and issued a limited restoration to great acclaim in 1969. But, in the intervening 40 years,restoration technology has progressed dramatically, and many more materials — including the innovative original sound mix —have since turned up. In 2006, Braunberger’s daughter Laurence and the Cinémathèque Française, with the support of the Thomson Foundation,the Franco-American Cultural Fund, and Ophüls’ son Marcel, embarked on a state of the art restoration. Scratches, tears and missingframes were fixed and the full stereophonic magnetic track restored, with the vibrant hues as conceived by production designer Jean d’Eaubonne (Casque d’or, Madame de...) and cinematographer Christian Matras replacing the washed-out existing prints and videos. The at-long-last restored Lola was a sensation at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “One of the signs of a great director is his ability to sustain a consistent tone throughout a film. Ophüls was such a director, and his Lola Montès has as much unity of tone as any film I can remember. It is all of a piece from beginning to end: the mood, the music, the remarkably fluid camera movement, the sets, the costumes. It is a director’s film… Using the circus to supply his narrative thread, Ophüls slides through a series of flashbacks with as much ease, and psychological completeness, as Welles exhibited in Citizen Kane.” – Roger Ebert. Approx. 115 min.

7:00 & 9:30pm Nightly w/Sat and Sun Mats at 4:30pm

send me a reminder email
email to a friend