Lola Montès
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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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.
Plot
In the mid-19th century, Lola Montès is a famous, past-her-prime dancer and courtesan who has led an eventful and highly scandalous life. (She supposedly holds a world record for number of lovers.) She is now reduced to performing in a New Orleans circus, where an impresario/ringmaster has both befriended and exploited her by making her the central attraction. In the course of a single circus performance—which dramatically reenacts Lola's life and career—flashbacks reveal, first, her affair with composer Franz Liszt; second, her unhappy youth and marriage to her own mother's boyfriend, Lt. Thomas James; and then her scandalous public breakup with conductor Claudio Pirotto. Along the way her career as a dancer and "actress" has its ups and downs, and she initially rejects the career advances of a younger version of Ustinov's impresario. In a longer flashback, constituting most of the second half of the film, her career as courtesan reaches a peak: her affair with the Bavarian King Ludwig I, which incenses his subjects and leads to his eventual downfall in the March Revolution of 1848. In a final circus sequence, Lola—a "fallen woman"—ascends to the apex of the big top tent for a symbolic, death-defying plunge. She is last seen in a cage, allowing her hand to be touched and kissed by a very long queue of male, fee-paying circus patrons.
Cast
- Martine Carol as Lola Montès
- Peter Ustinov as Circus Master
- Will Quadflieg as Franz Liszt
- Anton Walbrook as Ludwig I, King of Bavaria
- Oskar Werner as Student
- Henri Guisol as Horseman Maurice
- Lise Delamare as Mrs. Craigie, Lola's mother
- Paulette Dubost as Josephine, Lola's maid
- Jacqueline Cantrelle as friend of conductor