Lola Montès

The ravishing new restoration was showcased to huge acclaim at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and will also be shown at this year’s Telluride and New York Film Festivals. It is the only film ever to have been selected for the New York Film Festival three times: for the very first NYFF in 1963, again in 1969 (in an earlier, not so successful, restoration), and this year. It was following the 1963 festival screenings that critic Andrew Sarris famously wrote, “In my unhumble opinion, Lola Montès is the greatest film of all time, and I am willing to stake my critical reputation on this one proposition above all others.” In 1969, Sarris wrote, “Lola Montès is clearly the film of the year, or any year.”

In a garishly colored circus, the suckers line up at a buck a kiss with 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 the flashbacks underscores the difference between reality and memory, each flashback with its own color scheme.

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 missing frames were fixed and the full stereophonic magnetic track was restored and remastered in Dolby Digital, with the vibrant hues as conceived by production designer Jean d’Eaubonne and cinematographer Christian Matras replacing the washed-out existing prints and videos. The original CinemaScope ratio of 2.55:1 has also been restored (later prints were made in the narrower ratio of 2.35:1, cropping off image on the left and right of the screen), along with five minutes of long-unseen footage.

“The most beautiful cinemascope movie ever made. Ophüls uses color with a dazzling, kaleidoscopic imagination.” (Phillip Lopate)

"Superb: there is not a flaw in the mise en scène, not a dull frame for the eye." (Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic)

“A baroque masterpiece… among the most visually ravishing works the cinema has to offer.” (Dave Kehr, New York Times)

“Ophüls slides through a series of flashbacks with as much ease, and psychological completeness, as Welles exhibited in Citizen Kane.” (Roger Ebert)

"Ophüls' masterpiece . . . majestic and complex . . . nearly as reviving and moving as the response of Mozart to da Ponte's Cosi Fan Tutte." (Penelope Gilliatt, New Yorker)

“Truly a major cinematic event.” (46th Annual New York Film Festival notes)

Official Selection of 2008 New York, Telluride & Cannes Film Festivals