Lola Montès (Gamma Film, Florida Films, Union-Film, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Late on Friday, August 13, just after I posted the above, I went on the Facebook page of Chris Schneider, my friend of nearly 35 years and whom I could always count on for intelligent conversation about books, plays and movies, and was shocked to find that he had passed away about two weeks ago of heart failure. The ironies abound: after years iof having heard of Lola Montès I had finally been inspired to order a copy of the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the restored version by a post Chris had put up a couple of months ago on his Facebook page. So when Charles and I screened the film last Thursday night we were unwittingly sending an envoi to him. To add to the irony, the film was the last work of director Max Ophuls before he passed. I miss having the chance of getting to talk with Chris about this movie now that I've finally seen it, and I’m dedicating this article about it to his blessed memory. – M.G.C., 8-14-21

Last night I ran my latest item from the Criterion Collection, which like Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us was a film that had been discussed in depth in David Thomson’s quirky late-1960’s book Movie Man: Lola Montès, a 1955 French film directed by Max Ophuls (his final credit before he died in 1957) and his only film in color and CinemaScope. The writing credits on this one were pretty convoluted: the ostensible source was a novel by Jacques Laurent called The Extraordinary Life of Lola Montez, a real-life character who was actually of mixed English and Irish parentage (her original name was Eliza Rosanna Gilbert), though she grew up in India because her dad was in the British military and was stationed there. When he died his mother moved her to England and she tried to start a stage career as an actress and dancer, passing herself off as a Spaniard named “Lola Montez,” only she got recognized by some of her dad’s old military buddies and ended up fleeing to the Continent. She became a star in France and racked up a series of lovers – some of them rich men who paid for the privilege – and then traveled to Germany and became the mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Alas, her extravagant tastes and speed with which she was spending the king’s money was one of the causes for the 1848 revolution against the Bavarian monarchy. She managed to get out of the country in time and ended up in the U.S., working as an entertainer (doing her famous “spider dance”) first on the East Coast and then in the California gold country. She lived for two years in Grass Valley, California (which is why my husband Charles, who lived with his mother for 12 years there, recognized her name; the house where she lived in Grass Valley is an officially designated California historical landmark). Eventually she did a tour of Australia and then returned to the U.S., where she lived quietly and occasionally gave lectures until her death at age 39 from the effects of tertiary syphilis.

From those basic facts Laurent, Ophuls and the writers he worked with on the film (Ophuls receives sole credit for the screenplay but shares one with Annette Wagemant for “adaptation” and Jacques Natanson has a credit for “dialogue”; Peter Ustinov, actor and playwright who’s the male lead in the film, wrote dialogue for an English-language version – presumably a dubbing, though there are bits of English and German in the film as it stands – while Franz Geiger has a similar credit for German dialogue and imdb.com lists Jean-Paul Le Chanois as an uncredited co-adapter) constructed a movie which features an on-her-way-down Lola Montès (Martine Carol) being exhibited as a circus act by a ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) who narrates her life story as the members of her circus troupe re-enact it with Lola playing herself. The film dissolves from the circus to a scene in a carriage between Lola and Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg) in the throes of a breakup – he’s just written a piece called “Valse d’Adieu” (“Waltz of Goodbye”) and after he realizes she’s leaving him for good (for reasons Ophuls and the writers keep relatively veiled – much of this movie consists of events and motivations that are merely hinted at, not explained in detail the way so many movies depict things) he writes on top of the score “Triste” (“sad”). The music actually heard in the film is by Georges Auric, one of the 1920’s group of French composers known as “Les Six” (“The Six”), but like a lot of the other members he had toned down his style over the years and creates a bittersweet, nostalgic score that sounds right for a film set in the 19th century.

Then we flash further back to the death of Lola’s father, her flight to Europe with her mom, the marriage mom sets up for her with a rich banker who was her father’s friend (when mom stresses how much money he has and how comfortable she can be if she weds him, Lola says, “But he’s so old! Why don’t you marry him?”), her decision to marry a not-rich man who was her father’s ensign in the army, their breakup and her career on the continent. One quirk about this movie is that we never see Lola Montez perform in her prime; I don’t know if that was a conscious artistic decision on Ophuls’ part or whether Martine Carol simply couldn’t sing or dance, but whatever it was it’s actually a good idea: by keeping us relatively in the dark as to how good Lola Montez was as an entertainer, our attention remains not on her skills but the effect she had on her audiences. Cutting back and forth between Lola’s circus act and the events of her life, we finally get to the Big Part of the story: her relationship with King Ludwig I (Anton Walbrook, as magnificently authoritative as ever) and the way she was forced to flee the country after riots, sparked by pamphlets accusing the king of impoverishing Bavaria’s taxpayers to lavish money on her (much the way a large part of the impetus of the French Revolution had been similar pamphlets denouncing Marie Antoinette, a parallel that was probably not lost either on Bavarians in the 1840’s or the 1950’s audiences for this French-made film), turn into a revolution that threatens to depose the king and end the monarchy. (As it turned out, like the other 1848 revolutions in Europe, this one was defeated by a counter-revolution and Bavaria remained an independent kingdom until it was incorporated into the Greater Germany created by Kaiser Wilhelm I of Prussia and his “Iron Chancellor,” Otto von Bismarck – and Bavaria was actually the last German state to give up its independence.) There’s an amusing sequence in which the increasingly deaf Ludwig goes to see an ear specialist (who has a giant statue of a human ear in his office) and one of the recommended treatments is music – “anything but Wagner. You can hear him from the bottom of a well!” Of course, ardent Wagnerian that I am, I savored the irony that Ludwig’s successor, Ludwig II, ultimately sponsored Wagner, subsidized him, built him both his theatre at Bayreuth and his own home there, and was kidded about it at the Bavarian court along the lines of, “Well, if he wants to keep a composer rather than a dancer like his father, that’s his business.”

Lola manages to escape Bavaria in a carriage booked by a 20-year-old student (the young Oskar Werner), in a long sequence which Ophuls left totally unscored; a Hollywood filmmaker would have turned up the music and hammered home the suspense aspects of the escape, but Ophuls kept it silent except for the normal noises these events would make and, in a film that lives by its understatement, makes the scene more powerful because he isn’t guying our reactions to it with a big score. Eventually the film ends at the circus, where Lola is about to climax her act with a dive from a dizzying height into a small net, and the ringmaster announces she’s going to do this without the larger safety net even though she’s feeling ill and risks missing the target and dying. We’re carefully led to believe that this is going to be the end – she’s going to miss and, without a net, she will die – and Ophuls carefully leads up to that and even does a shock cut to black (a departure for a director famous for cutting as little as possible and using camera movements instead to indicate transitions) until [spoiler alert!] we see her, alive and mostly well, in a cage being exhibited like an animal before the people who are being charged $1 each (the use of dollars as the currency is really the only clue we have that this is taking place in the United States – Ustinov even delivers his spiel in French, English and German the way the M.C. in the musical Cabaret would do later) to touch and kiss her hand, a privilege the ringmaster of course notes used to cost thousands of dollars in Lola’s glory days in Europe.

Film critic Andrew Sarris once proclaimed Lola Montès the greatest movie ever made – though he later transferred that title to Ophuls’ immediately previous film, The Earrings of Madame de … (ironically the film I would give the greatest-movie-of-all-time to is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film Andrew Sarris savaged when it came out – though he backtracked a little: one of his criticisms had been the clipped, militaristic way the astronauts in 2001 talked, and after the Apollo 11 moon landing he admitted he’d been wrong to criticize that because the real astronauts had talked the same way) – and while it probably will never make my 10-best-of-all-time list Lola Montès is a great movie whose attitude towards celebrity and fame – not only that they’re fleeting but that, like a lot of later stars, Lola Montez thought she was living her life on her own terms and establishing her independence, but she was really turning herself into a commodity and allowing herself to be manipulated by men for their profit (financial, sexual or both) – seems very modern. It is also a sumptuously produced movie and another souvenir of the days when color films were actually colorful. One of the worst things that ever happened to movies artistically was the standardization of color production; when color was still a relative rarity directors and producers actually thought consciously of how to use color to add to the artistic and dramatic effectiveness of a story. Today all too many movies are filmed in what I call “automatic color,” in which the colors are simply there with no effort to control them or use them for any conscious artistic purpose. (I still remember my disappointment with the film For the Boys, not only because the male lead was miscast – the part needed Robin Williams and got James Caan – but because a film that cried out for the creative use of color didn’t get it: the film should have opened in the kind of neon-bright, vivid colors associated with the three-strip Technicolor process used in the 1940’s, when its story begins, and slowly got darker and less openly colorful as the film progressed in time and the story became darker.)

Also, looking at Max Ophuls’ biography on imdb.com, I got the idea that one of the reasons he wanted to make a movie about Lola Montez was that he identified with her: both had re-invented themselves, including a name change (Ophuls’ original last name was “Oppenheimer” and he chose “Ophüls,” with an umlaut, from an old German aristocratic family; no wonder he had to flee the Nazis twice, in Germany in 1933 and in France in 1940), and both frequently had to move for political and cultural reasons. Ophuls had just got his career as a director going in Germany when the Nazis came to power and he spent the rest of the pre-war years mostly in France but also in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. He came to the U.S. and got stuck for years on Howard Hughes’ vanity production Vendetta, and though he made four films in Hollywood after World War II – including two of the very best films noir, Caught and The Reckless Moment, he never really “took” to American filmmaking and the limits imposed by the major studios. James Mason, the male lead in The Reckless Moment, recalled that Ophuls wanted to do a scene for that film containing so long and elaborate a camera movement it would have required a set stretching over two soundstages. Producer Harry Cohn vetoed the plan, and according to Mason, Ophuls was so miserable about not being able to do that shot “he never smiled again” for the rest of the shoot. (Ophuls’ directorial trademark was long camera movements – he never seems to want to cut when he can transition from one scene to another with a tracking shot or a pan – and one of the most interesting aspects of Lola Montès is the way he exploits the sheer width of the CinemaScope screen to make his camera movements longer and more fluid.) So after 1949 he high-tailed it back to France, made his final films there, and oddly returned to Germany, where he died on March 25, 1957 in Hamburg).

The version of Lola Montès we watched was prefaced by an introductory title claiming that the film caused a scandal at its premiere showing in Paris in December 1955 and was immediately taken away from Ophuls and extensively re-edited to normalize the narrative structure instead of presenting Lola’s story as a Citizen Kane-like series of flashbacks, and it was only in the 1990’s that another producer bought the rights to it and tried to bring it back as much as possible to Ophuls’ original intentions. A full restoration was done in 2008 by the Cinémathèque Française along with several private funders, under the supervision of Ophuls’ son Marcel (a filmmaker himself, known for extended-length documentaries about World War II and the Nazis: The Sorrow and the Pity, The Memory of Justice, Hotel Terminus). Lola Montès is yet another one of those great films I’d read about for years until the advent of home video, DVD’s and the Internet enabled me to score a copy and see it for myself – and while sometimes actually seeing or reading something you’ve been told was “great” for decades can be a disappointment, this time around I loved the work and could see why it’s so highly regarded.