Lola Montès (The Fall of Lola Montes) (The Sins of Lola Montes) poster & wallpaper

Anton Walbrook, Lise Delamare, Martine Carol

The life of famous courtesan Lola Montes is presented in the form of a circus attraction. In a garishly colored circus, the suckers line up at a buck a kiss with celebrated adventuress Lola, as the ri...( read more  read more... )ngmaster starts his spiel and the flashbacks begin. In 1955, "Lola Montes" was the biggest-budgeted French film to date, with its always-mobile camera gliding, tilting, and craning amid dazzling sets and costumes. 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.

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77% liked it

872 ratings

Critics

87% liked it

23 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 55 min.

Directed by: Max Ophüls

Release Date: December 23, 1955

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DVD Release Date: February 23, 1999

Stats: 65 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (65)

  • brooklynspo
    January 26, 2009
    brooklynspo
    Well, I love Ophuls but the Fox Lorber DVD sucks - maybe Criterion will release this by which time I will have done my due diligence and upgraded my crap 27" screen.

    Although it had moments of brilliance -, for the most part I found this flick very stilted and lacking the usua...( read more)l Ophuls' grace and charm. Some high hopes dashed.

    Update 2009 - OK I saw the latest restoration on a big screen - and the net gain is one half a star. There is no getting around the fact that this was a troubled, compromised production as well as Ophuls' first foray into color and Cinemascope. Among many flaws - I found the image distortion of the wide-screen format and Ophuls' ever moving camera to be highly imcompatible.

    That being said - the circus scenes and Peter Ustinov's performance are wonderful.
  • columbiatch
    October 25, 2008
    columbiatch
    My first experience with Ophüls convinces me that he is a master of the long fluid take aesthetic as much as Sternberg and Mizoguchi. The film travels back and forth between Lola's memories of episodes of her past life and her present as a gaudy circus show attraction which ironi...( read more)cally is a caricaturisation of her life and quite a fitting metaphorical, self-reflexive depiction of her rise and fall, as well as serving to call into question the truthfulness of Lola's portrayal of herself. The dual narratives allows Ophuls to compress what could easily been a 3 hour epic into under 2 hours while satirizing celebrity culture (Andrew Sarris calls Sarah Palin the new Lola) as Lola's sexual conquests are exploited mercilessly by the circus. In a way this film is a bit overwhelming to digest, as the dense compositions and gorgeous camera movements are hard to be savored in such a fast paced film.
  • shannylee38
    February 28, 2007
    shannylee38
    Very interesting camera work! I think Baz Luhrman was inspired with this film to make Moulin Rouge. If not, it strangely looks the same.
  • brownrecluse62
    October 29, 2009
    brownrecluse62
    I'm so glad to have seen this on the big screen. It is the very definition of lush - everything just looks so gorgeous, and the vivid colors and the opulence and the spectacle are simply intoxicating. This visual beauty, as well as the fascinating framing device of the circus ree...( read more)nactment, draws us in seductively. It starts to drag somewhat toward the end, and there is quite a bit of melodrama, but maybe that's the point: what, in the grand scheme of things, is all this - empty pursuit of social climbing, hollow pleasures - is it all just folly, cheap showmen's fodder after which kisses of this beautiful woman can be bought for a dollar? And still the spectacle in all its CinemaScope glory bowls us over. Now that there's a newly restored print, hopefully this movie can be more widely seen as it was originally intended.
  • Phonex
    October 17, 2009
    Phonex
    The tawdry, carnivalesque atmosphere of the traveling Mammoth Circus provides the ideal framework for Max Ophüls's resplendent Lola Montès, serving as both a pungent deconstruction of the cult of celebrity and a demystification of an elusive woman. Revisiting scandalous episodes ...( read more)from her life through a series of kitschy, seemingly incongruous reenactments involving constructed stage props, facile acrobatics, tableaux vivantes, and clown routines, former dancer and tabloid personality Lola Montès (Martine Carol) alternates between past and present, reality and myth, reconstructed memory and fictionalized performance, prompted at each salacious biographical juncture by a brash and goading ringmaster (Peter Ustinov). The flashback to the mutual end of a love affair with Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg) illustrates a fickleness and vanity that would lead to her numerous failed relationships with distinguished men (pragmatically towing along, on each rendezvous, her own coachman and personal attendant in order to retain a method of transportation after the inevitable break-up). Her return to England following her father's death in India, escorted by her mother (Lise Delamare) and her mother's young lover, Lieutenant James (Ivan Desny) exposes a reckless streak, leading to an impulsive, failed marriage to the volatile James (although ironically described by the ringmaster as a happy one) in an attempt to escape her mother's efforts to marry her off to a wealthy, much older man. Her early career as a chorus girl suggests a mediocrity for dancing that is compensated by a talent for courting attention, culminating in a scandal on the Riviera when she publicly upbraids her lover - the orchestra conductor - after discovering that he was married. A doomed affair with Bavarian king and arts patron, Ludwig I (Anton Walbrook), reveals an unexpected generosity and uncompromising, idealized romanticism. Creating an intrinsically bifurcated gaze by juxtaposing sumptuous images within a gaudy staging, Ophüls poses the question of audience complicity in cultivating the public appetite for celebrity, a moral ambiguity that is reflected in the shattering, parting shot of patrons queuing for a chance to kiss Montès's hand between the bars of a cage - collapsing the illusion of separation between reality and spectacle.
  • brianpark08
    December 10, 2006
    brianpark08
    Extremely boring. Do not bother watching, absolute waste of time.

View All Lola Montès (The Fall of Lola Montes) (The Sins of Lola Montes) Reviews

Critic Reviews

October 31, 2008
Ty Burr, Boston Globe

Seen on a big screen, this is a movie to get drunk on. full review

October 23, 2004
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

It is all of a piece from beginning to end: The mood, the music, the remarkably fluid camera movement, the sets, the costumes. full review

View more Lola Montès (The Fall of Lola Montes) (The Sins of Lola Montes) reviews at RottenTomatoes.com

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