(This looks MUCH better than the picture above. The circle with
the words, “scanned for eBay, Larry41” does not appear on the actual
photograph. I just placed them on this listing to protect this high quality
image from being bootlegged.)
</font><P><font face="wide latin" size="+1"color="blue">
Max
Ophuls, Martine Carol, Peter Ustinov still LOLA MONTES (1955) #11, original studio SUPER SHARP
DETAILS IN THIS VINTAGE PHOTOGRAPH!
</font><p>
This 9.5” x 7” inch still would look great framed on display in
your home theater or to add to your portfolio or scrapbook! Some dealers by my
lots (see my other auctions) to break up and sell separately at classic film
conventions at much higher prices than my low minimum. A worthy investment for
gift giving too!
<p><b> PLEASE BE PATIENT WHILE ALL PICTURES LOAD
</b><font face=“Ariel”size=“+1” color=“red”>After checking out this
item please look at my other unique silent motion picture memorabilia and Hollywood
film collectibles! WIN SEVERAL OF MY AUCTIONS AND SAVE SHIPPING COST IF I CAN
SHIP THEM TOGETHER! $</font> See a gallery of pictures of my other
auctions <a
href="http://search-desc.ebay.com/search/search.dll?MfcISAPICommand=GetResult&ht=1&ebaytag1=ebayreg&query=larry41&query2=larry41&search_option=1&srchdesc=y&exclude=&category0=&minPrice=&maxPrice=&ebaytag1code=0&st=2&SortProperty=MetaEndSort">HERE!</a>
<p>
<font face="ARIAL" size="+1"color="blue"> This photograph is an original
photo chemical created pictures (vintage, from original Hollywood studio
release) and not a digital copy or reproduction.
</font><p><font face="wide latin" size="+1"color="red">
DESCRIPTION: </font><I> <P>
Max
Ophuls' final film (and his only movie in color) is a cinematic tour-de-force
masquerading as a biography, in this case a dazzling fictionalized life of the
notorious 19th century dancer, actress, and courtesan. A still beautiful, but
weary and disillusioned (and, as we later discover, ailing) Lola Montes
(Martine Carol) is first seen as the featured attraction at a seedy American
circus, appearing at the center of a series of various tableaux depicting the
scandalous events for which she is known. With a strangely sincere yet sinister
and manipulative ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) providing color commentary, some of
it very ironic on two or more levels, the movie flows between these staged
recreations in the circus and the events as recalled by the subject. In a
series of dissolves, the film takes us through her girlhood with her mother,
interrupted when her mother's lover (Ivan Desni) becomes attached to the
daughter; her unhappy marriage and its aftermath; romances with composer Franz
Liszt (Will Quadflieg), abduction by a Russian general (in the arms of
Cossacks, no less); her affairs across the landscape of Europe with men great
and notable; her thwarted aspirations as a dancer; and her romance with King
Ludwig I (Anton Walbrook) of Bavaria, which led to her being made Countess of
Landsfeld, and, later, to his abdication. The gracefulness of Ophuls' cyclical
narrative, and the transitions between the recalled elegance of the locales,
and the people with whom her romances and affairs took place, and the seediness
of the circus -- where she is also compelled, in the course of performing, to
perform as an aerialist -- were lost on viewers in 1955. And for many years the
movie only existed in a version re-cut without the director's approval, in
which the story was presented in linear fashion. It was only in the 1960's,
long after Ophuls' death, that efforts were made to restore the original
structure, and in 2008 the movie's original Technicolor luster was restored to
its full depth and richness.
<p>
</I><p><font face="wide latin" size="+1"color="purple">
CONDITION:</font> <p>
<b> This quality vintage and original still in Near MINT condition
(old yes, but mostly flawless) it is has sharp, crisp details and it is not a
re-release, not digital or a repro. It came from the studio to the theater
during the year of release and then went into storage where a collector kept
them for many years! I have recently acquired two huge collections
from life long movie buffs who collected for decades… I need to offer these
choice items for sale on a first come, first service basis to the highest
bidder.
</b>
<P>
<font face="wide latin" size="+1"color="blue">SHIPPING:</font><P>
Domestic shipping would be FIRST CLASS and well packed in plastic, with several
layers of cardboard support/protection and delivery tracking. International
shipping depends on the location, and the package would weigh close to a half a
pound with even more extra ridge packing.
<p>
<font face="wide latin" size="+1"color="green"> PAYMENTS:</font><P>
Please pay PayPal! All of my items are unconditionally guaranteed. E-mail me
with any questions you may have. This is Larry41, wishing you great movie
memories and good luck…
<P><font face="wide latin" size="+1"color="red">BACKGROUND:
</font><I><P>
One of the signs of a great director is his ability to sustain a
consistent personal tone throughout a film. The work of certain directors can
be recognized almost at once; a few hundred feet of Godard or Fellini are
sufficient. Max Ophuls was such a director, and his
"Lola Montes" has as much unity of tone as any film I can remember.
It is all of a piece from beginning to end:
The mood, the music, the remarkably fluid camera movement, the sets, the
costumes. It is a director's film. The actors are in Ophuls' complete control,
an additional element in his examination of the romantic myth.
His
story involves the infamous Lola Montes, "The Most Scandalous Woman in the
World," the mistress of Franz Liszt and King Ludwig of Bavaria, of
students and artists, of soldiers and ringmasters. We find her in a New Orleans
circus, the star attraction in a review of her sensational career. Peter Ustinov, the
ringmaster, narrates her past as Lola revolves on a platform. Later the
customers will have their chance to spend a dollar and kiss her hand.
The
device of the circus is as successful as it is daring. Using it to supply his
narrative thread, Ophuls slides through a series of flashbacks with as much
ease, and psychological completeness, as Welles exhibited in "Citizen
Kane." The structure of the film is terribly artificial --
flashbacks suspended from a fantasy circus -- and the style itself is a highly
mannered romanticism. But it works; Ophuls understands and justifies his
method.
He
is not so successful, unfortunately, with the performance of the late Martine Carol in the title role. Famous in the 1950s
as a sort of prototype Bardot, Miss Carol was a third-rate actress, and she
comes across as wooden, shallow, not even very attractive.
Ophuls
apparently needed Miss Carol's box-office name to help justify his $1,500,000
budget (this was the most expensive French film to date when it was completed
in 1955). He tries to make an advantage of her weakness by directing her almost
as a doll; her function is to watch impassively while her lovers save her
scenes. The best performance in the film is by Anton Walbrook as the deaf, touching old king. Peter Ustinov
is typically excellent. Oskar Werner, as a
young student, is not much better than ever.
Note: "Lola Montes" was a
commercial flop when Ophuls released it in 1955. He died two years later, still
engaged in a battle with the film's producers. A savagely butchered version was
in circulation for a few years. Through the efforts of the Village Voice's
Andrew Sarris and other lovers of the film, the original, uncut version was
shown at the 1963 New York Film Festival and again at last year's festival.
<P>
You can’t keep a
good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts,
goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not
talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the
Rain, a triple threat: could not sing, act, or especially dance. But
she must have had something beyond her enchanting beauty and the torrent of
fabrications with which she recast herself from County Sligo–born Eliza Gilbert
to Spanish queen of the tarantella, her signature dance—Lola whirled feverishly
as tiny rubber spiders flew from the folds of her hiked skirts.
In 1861, having
reclaimed her Irish name, Montez died of pneumonia, at thirty-nine, an
impoverished Swedenborgian religieuse living on the west side
of Manhattan’s Seventeenth Street, her legacy a saga that would reduce many
biographers to a babble of probablys, possiblys, and almost certainlys.
She had enthralled cities on three continents, not least San Francisco in 1853.
Despite unanimous derision of her thespian abilities (she starred in her own
productions of the opera Maritana, Ponsard’s Charlotte
Corday, and her Lola Montez in Bavaria, inspiring a
stream of parodies), a reporter for the Alta Californiadescribed
Montez as a “very comet of her sex . . . flying through space,
alone, unguided, reckless, and undestined.” He speculated that to know her
“noble” heart would “doubtless turn the lip that whispers busy scandal white
with shame.” Settling briefly in the gold rush sanctuary of Grass Valley,
Montez was immortalized by miners, who named the area’s highest peak Mount
Lola.
Swathed in rumors
of revolution and a Byzantine trail of eminent lovers—rumors she somehow
managed to encourage and deny—the Countess of Landsfeld, a title given Lola by
Bavaria’s Ludwig I, even won over Grass Valley women, who admired her way with
children (Lola inspired six-year-old Lotta Crabtree, who went on to enjoy great
renown on the stage); critics (Lola challenged them to duels); and propriety (Lola
smoked in public). In her lively 1928 narrative of Lola’s West Coast exploits,
Constance Rourke writes: “By all rules, at least the women of the village
should have outlawed Lola Montez. There was indeed a pause, a struggle; then
into the brief chaos stepped a few resolute spirits; and as result Lola
continued to do as she chose, with only casual criticism, because she was
beautiful and unexpected, and because tolerance was abroad in California as an
almost explosive element.”
“Beautiful and
unexpected”: the phrase applies equally well to Max Ophuls’s 1955 masterpiece,
which also met with blanket derision and, worse, the addled fear of its
producers, who thought they could recoup their investment by butchering one of
the most innovative and elaborately wrought spectacles in cinema history.
Mauled by hacks, faded by time, Lola Montès—Ophuls’s last film, and
his only one in color and CinemaScope—has survived, miraculously, every
indignity. After the hooting at its infamous premiere, it was championed by a
handful of filmmakers and critics, among them François Truffaut, Marcel Ophuls
(Max’s son), and Andrew Sarris, whose intrepid claim that it was “the greatest
film of all time” forced everyone else to see it, if only to lambaste Sarris,
guaranteeing him a place among the cinema’s true gallants.
Even so, Lola
Montès languished in various states of undress until 1968, when most
of the director’s intentions were restored. Another four decades would pass
before digitization and resolve made the present version possible. We can thank
Pierre Braunberger, who acquired the film rights; Laurence Braunberger, who
took over the restoration from her father after his death; Marcel Ophuls, who
supervised the work; and the Thomson Foundation for Film and Television
Heritage, the Franco-American Cultural Fund, and the Cinémathèque française for
financial and other help. This 2008 rendering, shown with much success at
Cannes and Telluride, and now released by Criterion, gives us the 1955 premiere
version, with the original color design and correct framing, and the
challenging stereophonic and multilingual soundtrack. Lola Montès has
never looked or sounded better.
“Life for me is .
. . a movement,” says the movie’s Lola. “My life is whirling in my head,” she
frets. Few would have been surprised if Ophuls—the bard of pictorial motion,
whose camera doesn’t simply permit us to see but rather, like an enthusiastic
friend, pulls us into the whirl of life—had made those statements about
himself. Max and Lola promised to be a couple made in dolly-shot heaven. Yet
his Lola is far removed from history’s spitfire dervish. More often than not,
the camera circles or closes in on her recumbent on a divan or fixed on a
platform, as inert as a wedding cake ornament. If Lola Montès is
a film infatuated with motion, its heroine is often a study in motion denied.
This is nothing like a conventional movie biography. It is, instead, a profound
meditation on the presumptions and limitations of all biography. So much has
been written about the director’s virtuosity that relatively little is said
about his scrupulous treatment of truth, power, gender, compromise, the selling
of the self.
Lola Montez, a
woman famous for making herself infamous by romping across nations, continent
to continent (including Australia), spinning like a frenzied top in senorita
drag, was an ideal subject for Ophuls, whose films are no less besotted by
masks and vanity than by movement. Yet the film did not originate with him; he
wasn’t even the first choice of its backers. Nor was it Ophuls’s idea to work
with the hack writer Cécil Saint-Laurent (known for best-selling historical
romances and a history of women’s undergarments that are no longer read in
France or anywhere else) or the teasing star of boudoir melodramas Martine Carol,
celebrated for the hourglass figure she generously displayed in bathtub scenes.
Indeed, in the end, Ophuls did not work with Saint-Laurent, whose screen credit
was merely part of the production fanfare and a beard for Ophuls’s free
interpretation of Lola’s story (although Saint-Laurent did eventually write an
unimportant book on Montez).
Carol, however,
turned out to be a blessing, though admittedly this is a minority view. Her
stony beauty encouraged Ophuls to objectify Lola in a way that would not have
been possible with a more expressive actor. This is a film that is often intent
on keeping its emotional distance. In transforming the immodestly blonde Carol
into a corseted brunette, Ophuls created an image surprisingly close to
portraits of the real Lola, while emphasizing the cryptic nature of sexual
allure. Had he been able to hire Gina Lollobrigida, he might have given us the
spider dance Lola; with Danielle Darrieux, Jeanne Moreau, or Ingrid Bergman, he
might have given us a contemplative, flirtatious, commanding Lola. With Carol,
he presents Lola as a prisoner of sex, and draws a cinematic line—a tracking
shot, of course—between the waxen object of our curiosity and her unknowable
interior life.
Interiority is
objectified on two levels: in the flashbacks, which invariably contradict the
iniquitous, rhetorically mawkish ringmaster (Peter Ustinov, shot with merciless
detachment), and in the marvelously kaleidoscopic activity of the circus. This
tent, with its life-size, pint-size, pictorial, revolving, climbing, falling,
prancing, juggling iterations of Lola and the rest of the dramatis personae,
along with its multidimensional floating and fleeting objects, suggests at
times nothing so much as the inside of her head: the landscape of recollection,
where memories may hang from a thread (a bobbing crown) or climb a tightrope
straight up—not to the stars (which Lola will glimpse only once, in the
remembrance of her curtailed childhood) but to the tent’s closed peak. The real
Montez gave lectures, receiving a higher fee than Dickens during their
respective American tours. But she never appeared in a circus or toured as a
sideshow act, unlike other notorious figures, from Robert Ford to Evelyn Nesbit
to the fallen stars of today’s talk show confessionals. No, the circus is
Ophuls’s inspired tour de force, its skull-like claustrophobia heightened by
the absence of a single shot to place it in the larger world. We enter the big
top at the start, and exit when the camera forces us backward, away from the
arena, at which point a curtain shuts us out. There is no outside, no reality
beyond the tent and Lola’s memory.
Lola Montès is the kind
of flamboyant yet meticulous film that rewards the spectator’s age and
experience: the more we bring to it, the more we take away. Its remarkable
structure can be approached in diverse ways. This annotation, borrowing a
musical formulation, parses the film into six movements and a transition.
The first part
opens with a shot that tracks descending chandeliers to reveal a conductor,
outfitted as Uncle Sam, leading a blackface orchestra in a New Orleans circus.
The recurring motif of masks is thus introduced with patriotic irony: we are in
the antebellum South, at the height of minstrelsy. The ringmaster snaps his
impotent whip, promising the “most sensational act of the century” and a
“bloodthirsty monster with the eyes of an angel.” The camera tracks backward
through two lines of faux Lolas, juggling ninepins. In a film obsessed with
movement—lateral, circular, rising, falling—these shots augur the finale of
Lola’s acrobatic dive and the simultaneous entrance and exit of two audiences:
the men lining up in the film and us, in thrall to the film, forced from the
tent and consequently the movie.
The costumed
company hustles into the ring as a heart hangs prominently in the air.
Suddenly, the ringmaster rises from the netherworld via a trapdoor, vowing “the
truth, nothing but the truth.” Truth is the one thing he won’t deliver and has
no interest in delivering; his profession is ballyhoo, la publicité. Now,
finally, we glimpse Lola, lifted and set down on a circular platform, moved but
not moving. Another descending chandelier signals a medium close-up of Lola,
colored by a blue filter (the first of three such shots) and looking startled,
nervous, trapped. The ringmaster invites intimate questions, at two bits a
throw, but he rejects them as irrelevant or answers them himself. Does she
prefer love or money? “Both,” he answers, introducing one of the movie’s
central themes.
The business of prostitution
hovers over this film, but Ophuls makes a clear distinction between
prostituting one’s body (in Ophulsian theology, a venial sin at most) and
selling one’s soul (a mortal sin at least). Ophuls loves Lola, and whatever the
real Lola was, his Lola is not a whore, not even a courtesan, to use the softer
term granted mistresses of the court. True, she will get a palace from her
Bavarian king, but the film depicts theirs as a genuine love match. Elsewhere,
sex is a means of escape or an escapade in pleasure. Money does not change
hands. Not until she descends, in the ringmaster’s phrase, “from kingdom to
carnival,” sacrificing sexual independence and the possibility of love (however
fleeting) for the commerce of show business, does she put herself on the
market. At this point, even we in the bleachers are exhorted by the ringmaster
to pay for our pleasure.
Ophuls had nothing
against whores; he treats them with humor and respect in La ronde andLe
plaisir. He was, however, impatient with soulless capitalism, as in
his early Dutch filmComedy of Money, in which a singing ringmaster
explicates corruption in the market. By 1955, Ophuls had endured his own
experience with ballyhoo in Hollywood, and it is tempting to see Lola as a
fragile artiste at the mercy of the machinations of callous producers. Ophuls
is deeper than that, though. If Lola in the New World is bound by the
constraints of a three-ring circus, how did she fare in the old one? This
question brings us to the second movement and the first flashback, representing
the end of her liaison with Franz Liszt. Our initial introduction to an earlier
Lola finds her as placid with ennui
as she is in the circus.
For the record,
the real Lola knew Liszt in Dresden in 1843 but didn’t travel with him and may
never have slept with him; her most thorough biographer, Bruce Seymour, could
not undermine doubts cast on the affair by Liszt’s best biographer, Alan
Walker. Ophuls, however, imagines them as artistic competitors, with separate
coaches so that she can escape at will. We see her reclining with cigar, moved
but not moving, languidly seducing him as a farewell gesture by undoing his
cravat—an action that will be reprised when she claims the fraternal scarf of
Oskar Werner’s student.
By beginning the
flashback sequences with Liszt, the film establishes Lola as an adventuress
with celebrity connections while showing that, far from being on the make, she
possesses a mature sense of love’s labors and the tussle for power that is the
price of emancipation—an issue played out repeatedly as she flees her mother,
her husband, and Bavarian mobs. The ringmaster will later tell her: “Talent
doesn’t interest me . . . only power and efficiency.” Here the
contest is treated lightly: Liszt expects dancers to follow his music, not the
reverse. Cut to the inn, as servants move her baggage, enacting the whirlwind
that Lola claims is her life but has yet to enact. She stands like a mannequin
in a dress so vibrantly green in this print that it can hardly fail to recall
the one Scarlett O’Hara fashions from her curtains. After Lola bids Liszt
good-bye, her coach heads for the horizon.
Part three: At the
circus, Lola appears caged as the ringmaster announces that she will now look
back at how “her extraordinary career took root in the beautiful and generous
soil of a happy family life.” The ringmaster controls the narrative—that is,
the order in which the tales are chronicled. Yet Lola’s memories are utterly
autonomous, contradicting every sentimental or slanderous comment he makes. He
speaks of her “happy youth” and “radiant adolescence” as we see her mother, a
whore with a heart of lead, attempt to pimp her out to an old man.
In this episode,
Ophuls tries something that was not acceptable to audiences at the time but
that seems effective and postmodern now. Lola at sixteen is played by Carol
(thirty-four) not as a girl but as her mature self dressed as a girl—in line
with the way memory actually works. In 1955, audiences howled in disbelief when
Lola answered the question about her age, and so her line was wiped off the
soundtrack. (It’s still missing.) Yet this vital sequence, in which Lola
travels with her mother by ship to Europe, derives its heartrending power from
the hapless dislocation of Carol’s Lola, literally at sea in another time.
Ophuls underscores her predicament with a sublime tracking shot as she walks
from her sleeping quarters to find her mother dancing, and then to the bow,
where she looks at the stars. Lola’s stroll, her most decisive movement in the
film thus far, is followed by other long walks, as the scene switches to Paris:
climbing the theater stairs after her mother, and then racing to freedom with a
dare hurled at her mother’s young lover—“Marry me!” Meanwhile, in the present,
as Lola sits on the circus platform, another level is added to the narrative,
in the guise of a doctor concerned with her failing health.
The fourth
movement is divided into two sections separated by the transition, which
develops the doctor’s role. The first part is set in the circus, where Lola is
obliged to reenact her catastrophic marriage. At this point, we are invited to
ponder which is the more bizarre image: Lola remembering herself at sixteen or
Lola pretending, at the command of the ringmaster, to be “virginal and pure,”
draped in white for the rubes in the tent. No wonder her life is whirling in
her head. And the film is whirling too, as the camera helps create three
concentric circles: Lola on her round platform rotates to the left; the outer
platform that surrounds her rotates to the right; the camera moves to the left.
Truth is again
channeled in contrary directions too. A flashback shows Lola’s escape from an
alcoholic, philandering husband as the ringmaster tells the crowd of her
marital bliss. It’s okay to present Lola as the apex of scandalous womanhood,
but marriage and maternal love are sacred, and the ringmaster doesn’t want to
make her out to be a victim (her husband contemptuously calls her “the eternal
victim”). The rubes won’t pay to feel sorry for her, not when they’ve come to
worship the dark side of the eternal feminine.
After the escape
(Lola bites the hand that fed her), we return again to the tent, where Lola, in
a tutu and backed by a corps of male dancers with coins for heads, re-creates
her training as a dancer—in ballet, no less. Lover follows lover as the
ringmaster sings, to Georges Auric’s thick pastry of a melody: “You give your
body, but you keep your soul.” In placing her on a tightrope, Ophuls grants
Lola a talent that not even she would have claimed for herself, that of
daredevil acrobat.
The action is
interrupted by the crucial transitional passage, in which the doctor confronts
the owner of the Mammoth Circus, a stogie-chomping, white-faced clown who dons
his jacket to talk business. The doctor warns that the climax of her act is
insanely dangerous. From now on, the film will unfold on three alternating
levels: circus (commerce and lies), flashbacks (love and truth), and backstage
(mortality and calculation).
In the conclusion
to part four, Lola rises in a high headdress from belowground, once again a
transported statue. Installed on a conveyor belt, she re-creates apocryphal
stories or outright fictions, including nude bathing for a sultan. An affair
with a conductor brings her, via flashback, to a band shell on the Riviera,
where, with dynamic movement matched by the camera, she bestows his gifts of
jewelry on the wife he tried to keep secret. (The ringmaster rewards her ethics
with a cigar, which he proceeds to sell to the audience “in ten varieties.”) The
ringmaster shows up in the same flashback, boasting that he can make a star of
her, as he has done for a piano-playing elephant, and get her more money than
Barnum or Buffalo Bill. The ringmaster—Ustinov has his best scene here—is
odious but vulnerable; in Ophuls’s cinema, as in Renoir’s, everyone has his
reasons. Lola declines, knowing that if she accepts his offer, it will be the
end of her. Back at the circus, a recital of putative lovers takes acrobatic
Lola up ropes and ladders to the pinnacle of the tent and the high point of her
legend. With the second blue-filtered portrait as prelude, she travels back in
time to Bavaria.
The fifth section
is a tour de force, heightened by the incisive performance of Anton Walbrook as
Ludwig I, who is rendered with a wit and intelligence that were evidently
denied the real monarch. Oskar Werner’s vain but naive student is also based on
a (minor) historical character, Elias Peissner, the leader of the Alemannia
fraternity, formed in Lola’s honor. Ophuls simplifies the relationships:
apparently, Lola swore fidelity to Peissner, insisting that she loved Ludwig
only as a father, thus two-timing them both. Peissner boldly confronted the
king, who financed his travels to the United States, where he taught languages
until, promoted to colonel as an enlisted man in the Union army, he was killed
during the Civil War. For Ophuls’s purposes, the student shows that Lola
dispenses her favors freely and inspires fierce loyalty, representing to the
fraternal revolutionaries “love, freedom, everything [the conservatives]
detest!”
Audiences of 1955
did not much appreciate the bait-and-switch approach that gives this episode
much of its drollery. Ophuls will not let us see Lola dance—neither her
unsuccessful audition (her maid remarks, “As always, they didn’t like the
bolero”) nor her royal performance (we see the king tapping his fingers in
time); nor do we get to see her illustrious breasts (we get extended business
about finding a needle and thread to sew up her ripped bodice). But Lola is no
longer a waxen figure! The Lola who on the Riviera dashed to confront her
lover’s wife now predominates, as she gallops to meet the king, and charms him
with a single step of a Spanish fandango—no more than a pose, really.
The camera, too,
is more fanciful than ever, altering the frame to suggest a traditional,
pre-CinemaScope field, recalling iris effects of the silent cinema to
underscore Lola’s royal conquest. At the theater, after her performance, the
camera rises from the king (and his indulgent queen) to the cheap seats, where
her student lover cheers, then rises higher to settle on the chandelier. Two
brief, consecutive scenes, each done in a single shot, are particularly savory.
First, Ludwig arrives at a painter’s loft, in search of a slow-working artist
who will extend Lola’s stay in Bavaria for the time required to paint her
portrait. Who needs montage? Ludwig walks quickly around the room for ninety
seconds while the camera keeps effortless pace with him. This is followed
immediately by a wickedly brilliant tableau (almost a tableau vivant), as the
camera takes in Lola, posing in a fake sled against a snowy mural, her face
encircled by white fur, and a table at which the producer-king and the
director-painter negotiate over their work, which stands behind them and beside
the model, the immobile star on the canvas replicating Lola in the sled except
that her head is additionally circled by a halo—as though she were the heroine
in one of those Leni Riefenstahl mountain epics.
The art venture
has two punch lines. The first is the finished painting, Lola as an odalisque,
which no one dares hang (not even Lola, who does not want to advertise her
wares). The second, triggered by the first, is the king’s realization that his
problem is not how to keep Lola around but how to get rid of her—a difficulty
that escalates when he hears of incipient protests while visiting an ear
doctor. Soon, the rabble assaults the palace, and as the musical score resorts
to unembarrassed melodrama, a Caligari-like diplomat arrives with an ultimatum.
Lola runs through catacombs to escape and, once safe in her getaway carriage,
lapses into the languorous Lola of the early scenes, reclining with cigar in
hand. As Tanya says of Quinlan in Touch of Evil, her “future
is all used up.”
The sixth and
final movement is itself a circus trick. Lola, a ghost of her former self, must
perform the climax of her act, which we learn she has been doing for an
astonishing four months—astonishing because even a top acrobat in the best of
health would have trouble diving from a high-wire platform onto an object no
larger than a mattress. This, we are told, she has done show after show without
a net, though it’s impossible to know where the net would be. Under the
mattress? The doctor nonetheless argues for a net, which the ringmaster tricks
Lola out of. Now we have the last blue-filter portrait, followed by a genuine
close-up as the net is collapsed. Lola is dizzy, wavering, colorless; she has
no more chance of surviving her fall than Scottie does his in the preamble to
Vertigo. But, of course, she does survive, promptly resurrected as a captive in
the menagerie, selling kisses for a dollar, pimped out to the end. Yet can
anyone doubt that Lola remains triumphant, an object of veneration for all
trusting suckers everywhere, including Max Ophuls, who believed that character is a
kind of talent? His camera tracks back for a hundred glorious seconds before he
allows the curtain to be drawn, leaving Lola in peace, or at least enjoying the
bliss of celebrity homage, until, once more, we hit “Play” and return to the
big top.