Lola Montès
Lola Montès is a 1955 historical romance film and the last completed film of German-born director Max Ophüls. Based on the novel La vie extraordinaire de Lola Montès by Cécil Saint-Laurent, the film depicts the life of Irish dancer and courtesan Lola Montez (1821–1861), portrayed by Martine Carol, and tells the story of the most famous of her many notorious affairs, those with Franz Liszt and Ludwig I of Bavaria. A co-production between France and West Germany, the dialogue is mostly in French and German, with a few English-language sequences. The most expensive European film produced up to its time, Lola Montès underperformed at the box office. However, it had an important artistic influence on the French New Wave cinema movement and continues to have many distinguished critical admirers. Heavily re-edited (multiple times) and shortened after its initial release for commercial reasons, it has been twice restored (1968, 2008). It was released on DVD and Blu-ray in North America by The Criterion Collection in February 2010.
Not to be confused with Lola Montes (dancer). For other uses, see Lola Montez (disambiguation).Lola Montès
- Max Ophüls
- Annette Wademant
La vie extraordinaire de Lola Montès
by Cécil Saint-Laurent
- Gamma Film (France)
- Union-Film-Verleih (West Germany)
- 23 December 1955 (France)
- 12 January 1956 (West Germany)
- 114 minutes (original, lost version)
- 110 minutes/114 minutes (restored versions)
- France
- West Germany
- French
- English
- German
Legacy[edit]
Roger Ebert lauded the film's camerawork and set design, but felt that Carol's "wooden [and] shallow" performance as the titular character prevented the film from achieving greatness.[10] Nonetheless, it is today among Ophüls' revered works.[14] Dave Kehr called it a masterpiece, and wrote that "certainly this story of a courtesan's life is among the most emotionally plangent, visually ravishing works the cinema has to offer."[15] The film also received five votes in the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll.[16] Lola Montès is acclaimed in Danny Peary's 1981 book Cult Movies as one of the 100 most representative examples of the cult film phenomenon.