Max Ophüls (1955)

The sort of ill-fated masterpiece I would rather read about than sit through.  Very expensive for its time, the picture was seen as scandalous and a failure on its original release in France and was ruthlessly hacked about by the studio that produced it.  Max Ophüls died little more than a year after the December 1955 premiere.  It’s great that digital technology has allowed the film to be restored this year virtually in its original form – but great because it redeems an act of commercial vandalism rather than because the work is outstanding.

Almost garishly colourful and shot in Cinemascope, Lola Montès doesn’t at first sight look like a work of European film art but Ophüls’s characteristic swirling camera movement – lateral and vertical – is remarkable (fluent and incisive at the same time); and even I can see that the visual compositions (the steeply-angled shots, the use of mirrors, the characters photographed through lace curtains) are sophisticated and inventive.  Yet the extent to which the look of the film eclipses its dramatic and thematic aspects owes as much to the weakness of the latter as to the beauty of the visuals. Ophüls’s story of the nineteenth-century courtesan and Spanish dancer, Lola Montez (Irish-born, according to Wikipedia), is constructed as a series of flashbacks to her heyday in France and Germany.  These are framed by and eventually converge with scenes in a New Orleans circus, where Lola, past her best, is still one of the star attractions.   The circus, although it becomes integrated with the narrative, is essentially symbolic:  the fact that Lola’s degraded celebrity is put on display in a commercial transatlantic show (although its look and style seem more continental European than American) reinforces Ophüls’s themes of the transience of beauty and fame and of how famous lives are appropriated for popular entertainment.   Yet the script, by Ophüls and Annette Wademant (adapted from a novel by Cécil Saint-Laurent which, according to the BFI note, was itself a potboiler), doesn’t appear to have much else to say.

That puts pressure on the characters to develop in ways that will sustain the audience’s interest and, as Lola, Martine Carol is sadly (her presence did make me feel sad) lacking in allure and variety.   She is beautiful but – because she has no emotional mobility – it’s an inexpressive beauty.  There’s no real characterisation:  scenes are set up in a way that makes you think you’re meant to see Lola as an irresistible confusion of the demure and the wilfully passionate.  Except for a good bit in public gardens in Montecarlo, when she breaks off from a dance routine to climb up to a balcony to tell a woman she’s having an affair with the woman’s husband, Carol seems rather implacably remote (without the remoteness adding to Lola’s fascination).  Nor is she transformed when she dances.  Andrew Sarris’s piece that provided the BFI handout notes Carol’s ‘inescapable mediocrity’ as an actress;  and presents Ophüls’s understanding of her limitations and sympathetic view of her unsuccessful efforts to rise above them as somehow enhancing the film’s stature.   I don’t really understand this, or why Ophüls didn’t use a more nuanced actress who could express not just what made the character charismatic but also the difference between Lola in her prime and in her decline.  Martine Carol doesn’t convey the poignancy of the ephemeral but the unhappy, unchangeable permanence of a screen performance – even in a film as butchered as this one was – that doesn’t get anywhere.

The other main actors fare better.  Peter Ustinov as the circus ringmaster has, as well as wit, an authority which is increasingly melancholy.  Anton Walbrook brings an affecting, controlled yearning to the part of the Bavarian king whose mistress Lola becomes.   A young Oskar Werner is vivid and amusing as a student.    But you need to be someone for whom cinematic technique is enough to sustain you through two hours, who doesn’t also need developing themes or interesting interactions between people, to regard this as a great work of art.

9 November 2008