Le Plaisir (1952)

Le Plaisir was the second movie made by Max Ophüls after his return to France in the early 50s.

Max Ophüls had started his filmmaking career in Germany. He made a lot of films in France in the 30s. The next phase of his career took him to Hollywood. In 1950 he returned to France and made four final masterpieces, Madame de…, La Ronde, Lola Montès and Le Plaisir. They are among cinema’s greatest achievements.

It’s not difficult to see why he left Hollywood. He was not going to be able to make the wildly unconventional defiantly non-realistic movies he wanted to make in Hollywood. It’s not that Hollywood doesn’t have its own tradition of non-realist movies. The Busby Berkeley musicals, the Astaire-Rogers musicals, von Sternberg’s movies, all come to mind. But Ophüls had something quite different in mind - something much more European.

Ophüls steadfastly refused to film in colour until his final movie, Lola Montès. It’s easy to see why. Ophüls had a vision for cinema that could only work in black-and-white and in his 1950s movies he wanted to pursue that vision obsessively. In movies like La Ronde and Le Plaisir he created movies that made zero concessions to realism. These were uncompromisingly artificial movies but they were artificial in a cinematic rather than a stagey way. They are gorgeous movies. They have that particular glamour that can only be achieved in black-and-white.

In Le Plaisir (as La Ronde) we enter a slightly different world. It’s not quite a fairy tale world but it’s not the real world. It’s a world where charming amusing things can happen and the rules of everyday reality can be bent a little, or even ignored.

One of the other reasons Ophüls needed to lave Hollywood is that the movies he wanted to make were movies for grown-ups. Hollywood in the 50s was not ready for such movies.

Le Plaisir is a portmanteau film. It presents adaptations of three stories by Guy de Maupassant, all dealing in some manner with pleasure.

The first story, Le Masque, is very simple but with a slight off-kilter touch. The setting is an expensive, sophisticated and slightly naughty dance hall. An odd young man turns up. He is dressed as a dandy but he dances in a slightly clumsy manner and collapses. It is discovered that he is not a young man at all, but an old man. An old man determined not to renounce the pleasures of youth.

The second story, La Maison Tellier, takes place in a brothel. A very civilised well-run brothel. The madam, Madame Tellier, fusses over her girls like a mother hen. As becomes obvious when it closes for a day it is in fact the most vital social institution in the town. Without it there would be no social harmony.

It closes for a day so that the girls can attend the First Communion of Madame Tellier’s niece. For the girls it’s a holiday in the country. They have a lovely time in the sleepy little rural village but they’re happy to be back at work next day. They love working in the brothel.

You might think this story is going to contrast Sin and Innocence but the whores are as innocent and virtuous as the most innocent lass in the little rural village.

Le Modèle concerns an artist who discovers a new model. She inspires him. His career takes off. They fall in love. But the love affair does not prosper. There’s an interesting twist at the end.

Another reason Ophüls had to make these movies in France is that they have no single strong straightforward linear narrative. La Ronde has a circular narrative. The three stories in Le Plaisir are almost plotless. They evoke mood, they display the director’s mastery of gorgeous cinematic style, they offer some witty observations on life, love and pleasure.

There’s a bitter-sweet tone to all three stories. They don’t exactly have happy endings but they don’t have unhappy endings. Life goes. Like Ophüls’ camera, life just keeps moving. Ophüls isn’t cynical or moralistic. He is perhaps gently amused by human foibles. Even the old man in the first story isn’t seen as merely ridiculous or pathetic. He will keep pursuing pleasure until he finally drops dead. Perhaps that is not so very bad. Just as being a prostitute is not so very bad for the girls in the second story. Madame Tellier treats them with kindness and indulgence. Their customers are a good-natured lot. Perhaps one day they will decide to get married, but in the meantime they’re having a lot of fun.

Ophüls indulges himself in some of his favourite techiques. He loved shooting through windows and he loved tracking shots, and staircases and scenes that take place on two levels - that begin upstairs and then move downstairs. It’s a stunning virtuoso display.

An odd but entrancing movie. Highly recommended.

I've also reviewed Ophüls' La Ronde (1950) and Lola Montès (1955).

Gunsmoke (1953)

Gunsmoke is a 1953 Universal-International western directed by Nathan Juran. It certainly hits the ground running.

We get an action scene right at the start. We meet the hero Reb Kittredge (Audie Murphy). He’s a very likeable guy but a few minutes into the movie we know he has a Shady Past. We was, and maybe still is, a hired gun.

We’re introduced to rancher Dan Saxon (Paul Kelly). He’s in danger of losing his ranch. He has a beautiful daughter, Rita (Susan Cabot), who’s engaged to be married to Saxon’s foreman Curly (Jack Kelly). But Reb has already taken a shine to Rita. And Saxon is sure that Reb has been sent to kill him. That turns out to be not quite the case.

This is all within the first few minutes but already we know we have a classic setup for a western with lots of potential for tangled relationships between the main characters. And we’re not sure about the hero. Is he still a killer? This is how you make a western!

Reb is soon in for a surprise. He finds himself owning a ranch, the Square S ranch. It was Dan Saxon’s ranch. They made a deal, of a kind. It’s not all good news. He owns the debts attached to it as well. But he if can drive the herd to the railroad company he’ll have enough money to pay the debts.

There is of course a sinister figure pulling strings in the background. Matt Telford (Donald Randolph) aims to own every ranch in the valley. Including the Square S. He’ll stop at nothing, including hiring gunslinger Johnny Lake (Charles Drake) to kill Reb.

There’s high drama as Reb tries to drive his herd to market, in the face of all kinds of nefarious plots.

I think the ending is quite satisfactory. We know there’s going to be a showdown but we can’t figure out how Reb is going to manage this since he’s injured his right arm - his shooting arm. That problem is solved neatly.

This is Audie Murphy doing what he did so well, playing a really likeable guy who manages to give the impression that he could be very dangerous indeed. Reb is likeable and he’s also ambitious with a streak of ruthlessness. He has the ranch. Now he wants Dan Saxon’s daughter. She belongs to Curly. Reb will just have to take her away from Curly.

The supporting players are all perfectly adequate. Susan Cabot is fine as the prickly Rita and Mary Castle is very good as bad girl dancehall singer/dancer Cora Dufrayne.

This is not one of the great westerns and Nathan Juran is not one of the great directors He is however a skilled professional. He understands that pacing is everything. Keep the action moving along and nobody will notice any deficiencies in the script. That’s what he does here.

The movie was shot in Technicolor in the Academy ratio. Visually it’s impressive, which you expect from a 50s Universal-International western. The location shooting is very good.

The action scenes are handled well.

Not every movie has to be ground-breaking. Not every movie has to redefine the genre. This is not The Searchers or Rio Bravo. But there’s nothing wrong with well-crafted movies that meet our genre expectations and deliver solid entertainment. And Gunsmoke does that. Highly recommended.

I don’t think Gunsmoke is available on Blu-Ray but it looks quite OK on DVD.

The Last Picture Show (1971)

The Last Picture Show was Peter Bogdanovich’s second feature film and it launched him, briefly, as a superstar director.

This is a coming-of-age movie set in a tiny rapidly declining Texas town named Anarene. It begins in 1951.

Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges) are about to graduate from high school, along with Sonny’s girl Charlene and Duane’s girl Jacy (Cybill Shepherd). Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson) owns the pool hall, the cafe and movie theatre. There’s nothing else in Anarene worth owning. He’s a kind of mentor to Sonny and Duane.

In Anarene once you graduate from high school life is over. Duane eventually gets a job on an oil rig. That’s the most any male in Anarene can aspire to - well-paid manual labour. The girls have no aspirations. They will drift into marriage with losers.

Except Jacy. She at least has some dim notion that getting the hell out of Anarene would be a good idea. She knows that all she has going for her is that she’s pretty and men want to get into her pants. She’s a wannabe femme fatale but she doesn’t have the imagination to set her sights high enough and she isn’t smart enough and devious enough. She’s aiming to land a guy from Wichita Falls. To Jacy Wichita Falls is the Big City of a girl’s dreams, but the rich folks from Wichita Falls are only marginally less hopeless than the folks of Anarene.

Sonny dumps Charlene because after a year of going steady she won’t even let him put his hand up her skirt. He drifts into a futile affair with the middle-aged (Ruth Popper), the wife of the high school’s football coach. Nothing works out for any of the characters and they all end up more miserable than they were at the start. That’s the movie.

I can see what Bogdanovich is trying to do - showing us the futile squalid lives of losers in a loser town. He certainly succeeds. At times I do however get the feeling that this is one of those movies in which urban intellectuals express their fear and loathing of rural America. I definitely get the feeling that Bogdanovich despises his characters. Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps he was aiming for Tragedy. This could have been a good setup for a film noir but that’s not what Bogdanovich is shooting for. My suspicion is that he’s aiming for an art film.

Bogdanovich has made some aesthetic choices that are clearly very deliberate. It’s not just that the movie is shot in black-and-white. It’s shot in such a way as to drain the life out of everything. The landscape looks like a post nuclear apocalyptic wasteland. Robert Surtees was a great cinematographer so the lifeless feel was obviously not a mistake - it was deliberate.

The town looks like it’s waiting to die. The pool hall, cafe and movie theatre are the social and cultural hubs of the town. There’s nothing else. The pool hall looks completely derelict. The cafe and movie theatre look semi-derelict. The hero drives an ancient beat-up pickup truck.

The boys dress like losers.

The women are all dowdy. Not because they’re unattractive but because they have allowed themselves to look dowdy. They look defeated. Even Jacy, the closest thing the town has to a glamour babe, is totally lacking in glamour. This was Cybill Shepherd at the peak of her hotness. Jacy is a very pretty girl but she has no idea how to make the most of herself. She doesn’t know how to do her hair or makeup. She doesn’t know how to dress. And this is 1951, a time when women’s fashions were very glamorous.

It has a similar feel to those British kitchen sink dramas of the early 60s in which the working class protagonists learn that there is no hope and nothing to look forward to. There’s no point in thinking about sex - that will just lead to degradation and misery. No point thinking about love - the only person likely to fall in love with you is another loser. The best thing you can do is just throw yourself under a bus and get it over with. This movie takes the same approach to small town America. The luckiest character in the movie is the guy who gets squashed by a cattle truck. His suffering is at least over.

Not a single character in this movie gets even the smallest amount of joy from sex.

I strongly suspect that this movie was a box office hit because it quickly gained the reputation of being a dirty movie. Cybill Shepherd cavorting nude in a swimming pool! I also suspect that that’s why critics doted on it. They approved of its open treatment of sex. It made critics feel like they were watching a European at film (you know, those subtitled movies where the actresses take their clothes off). At the time American movies were very tentatively exploring the possibility of dealing with sex in a grown-up way.

And The Last Picture Show was definitely raunchy by 1971 standards - lots of nudity, frontal nudity, sex scenes, open discussion of sex. It’s interesting to compare it to Klute, a Hollywood movie released in the very same year that also deals with subject matter. Klute seems very tame by comparison. A brief blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of Jane Fonda’s nipples and that’s about it. So it’s easy to see why The Last Picture Show attracted interest from the public and from critics.

Timothy Bottoms gives the dullest performance in the history of cinema. The other cast members do their best. Cybill Shepherd is by far the best thing in the movie.

I find it difficult to stay interested in a movie that includes not a single characters I can care about. I can be captivated by a movie featuring only unsympathetic characters if they’re rotten in interesting ways.

I can see why critics adored this movie. It’s miserable, nihilistic and filled with loathing for small town America. Critics like that kind of thing. In 1971 it was just what they had been hoping for. This is Serious Filmmaking. I intensely disliked every minute of it.

The Trouble with Harry (1955) - Hitchcock Friday #13

The Trouble with Harry, released in 1955, was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and scripted by John Michael Hayes.

It can be seen as one of Hitchcock’s experiments. This is not an experiment in technique nor an experiment with narrative. This is an experiment in tone. This is full-blown black comedy, but of a kind that was totally new in mainstream American cinema.

The comedy-mystery (as distinct from out-and-out spoofs of the mystery genre) was an established genre but in such movies the murder is always seen as a terrible crime the perpetrator of which had to be brought to justice. There could be amusing hijinks along the way but murder itself could not be treated as a joke. But in The Trouble with Harry the murder actually is treated as an hilarious joke. Poor Harry is dead but nobody cares except for the fact that the existence of his corpse is rather inconvenient.

As in Shadow of a Doubt Hitchcock makes great use of small-town America as a setting but his purposes here are very different.

This is a gorgeous movie. This is a picture postcard world. A world so beautiful and idyllic that a corpse seems rather out of place.

You might think I’m weird but this movie seems to me to have a similar feel to the opening sequences of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. This is small town America at its most perfect, but it’s a bit too perfect. It’s so perfect it’s slightly disturbing. And while the people in this tiny burg are all very very nice people they regard poor Harry’s murder with total indifference. That’s the weird element that makes this movie so startling. And that makes it such an outrageous black comedy. The audience is not expected to feel the slightest concern about the fact that a man has been killed.

Which of course explains why this movie was initially a box-office flop (although it was re-released and eventually ended up in the black). Mainstream American audiences had never been exposed to such an oddly off-kilter movie. And they had never seen small town America subjected to such gleeful (albeit good-natured) mockery. It also explains why the movie was a hit in France. French audiences would not have been shocked in the least.

The other thing counting against this movie was its complete lack of star power. John Forsythe is well cast and he’s very good but he was never a big star and his name on the marquee was not going to sell tickets. Shirley MacLaine would become a star but at this stage she was a complete unknown and this was her first movie. Edmund Gwenn was the kind of character actor people would recognise without remembering his name. Big name stars might have made the movie easier to promote but as a star vehicle it would have been a different movie. It’s an ensemble piece and as such it works.

John Forsythe really is good. Shirley MacLaine was a nobody. She was just an understudy in a play when she was spotted. But she had the kooky quality Hitchcock wanted and he recognised her star quality immediately. She’s delightful here.

The plot is simple. A dead body turns up. His wallet identifies him as Harry. Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn), out hunting rabbits, assumes he shot poor Harry accidentally. And maybe he did. As the movie progresses other possibilities emerge. The one thing that is clear is that nobody cares that Harry is dead but his corpse is very inconvenient. The mystery doesn’t really matter. There’s no suspense. This is a comedy. A zany twisted deliciously black comedy. Black comedy was something Hitchcock did very very well. It was the kind of humour he loved.

The location shooting in Vermont is gorgeous, except that a lot of the time it’s not Vermont, it’s a Hollywood sound stage. The trees had already dropped their leaves, but Hitch wanted those lovely autumn leaves. So the crew collected the leaves, they were taken back to Hollywood and pinned onto fake trees on a sound stage. And it works. This is the magic of movies!

The Trouble with Harry is quirky and offbeat but delightful and charming. And it really is funny. It wasn’t what audiences and critics were expecting from Hitchcock but it’s great fun. Highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray looks exquisite and there’s a reasonably informative featurette.

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

The Eyes of Laura Mars is an important movie for several reasons. The obvious one is that it was scripted by John Carpenter. Carpenter was making a name for himself as a screenwriter at that time. His directing career would soon take off as well. In a very brief period he would write the screenplay for The Eyes of Laura Mars, would write and direct the TV-movie Someone’s Watching Me and then write and direct Halloween. But The Eyes of Laura Mars was his first real experience working for a major studio on a major production.

The script had apparently been floating around for a while and a lot of writers aside from Carpenter were involved at some stage. Which means it may not be fair to blame Carpenter for some of the deficiencies in the script.

Irvin Kershner was offered the directing job. He was an experienced director although not perhaps a terribly distinguished one. He has the distinction of having directed the worst Bond movie of the pre-Daniel Craig era, the trainwreck that was Never Say Never Again. Would The Eyes of Laura Mars have been better with Carpenter directing? Perhaps.

The Eyes of Laura Mars is also interesting because it has a slight giallo feel.

This movie is also important because although it was made in 1978 it has very slight hints of the 80s. It’s like a proto-80s movie. In some ways it’s very 70s. New York City as a garbage dump, a world of violence, sleaze and squalor. But Laura Mars is rich and famous. Her world is a world of glamour, style, high fashion and money.

And it’s a suspense thriller with hints of the supernatural (or at least the paranormal), something you see in a few European movies of the 60s and 70s but don’t expect in a Hollywood movie.

Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) is a very famous very successful photographer. It appears that she works in both the worlds of fashion photography and art photography. She’s a celebrity. And she’s controversial. Her photographs depict both high fashion and savage violence.

While doing a fashion shoot she has a vision. It has happened once before. A vision of murder. On the first occasion the murder actually did take place. And now it’s happened again.

The idea of someone seeing visions of murders before they happen was far from original. It is however given a few twists here. The visions are linked to her photography. If a photographer is a voyeur then she’s a voyeur of murder, but a kind of psychic voyeur of murder.

She finds out from cop Lieutenant John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones) that many of her earlier photographs bear uncanny similarities to police crime scene photos, photos that no-one outside the police department has seen. She may have been having these visions of future murders for quite some time without being aware of it.

What really freaks her out is that her interest in violent subject matter is a comparatively recent thing and she can’t explain why she suddenly developed this interest. It was just something that she felt compelled to do.

Laura will have further visions and there will be further murders.

Laura herself is not a suspect but it’s obvious that the murders have some kind of connection to her.

I have mixed feelings about Faye Dunaway but that may not be her fault. Apart from Chinatown she had a knack for being in movies that I really disliked. I don’t think of her as a bad actress. She’s pretty good here.

The movie does have a few definite weaknesses. The paranormal element could have been really interesting but is not developed fully. The screenplay really does have that “subjected to numerous rewrites” feel, because in fact it really did go through countless rewrites. The various thematic elements in the story, potentially interesting in themselves, just don’t quite come together as a coherent whole.

There is a clue early on that makes the identity of the killer very very obvious.

Perhaps the best thing about this movie is that the Laura Mars photographs were done by the great Helmut Newton. They’re superb. The two most successful and striking scenes are the fashion shoot scenes.

This movie has a few problems but don’t be put off by that. It’s an exceptionally interesting film that just doesn’t feel like a 1978 Hollywood movie. The giallo influence is very obvious and the world of high fashion figures in many notable gialli. The voyeurism theme is handled extremely well. I liked the way Laura is a voyeur but not just in the obvious ways (which she’s intelligent enough to be aware of) but in ways of which he’s not consciously aware. She is is some ways a passive voyeur - the images control her rather than her being in control of the images. And that’s disturbing for a photographer. Photographers manipulate reality but Laura is herself being manipulated.

The Eyes of Laura Mars is well worth seeing. Highly recommended.

Aelita: Queen Of Mars (1924)

Aelita: Queen Of Mars, directed by Yakov Protazanov and released in 1924, was not quite the first science fiction feature film and was not quite the first feature film to deal with space travel - the 1918 Danish film Himmelskibet (A Trip To Mars) has that honour. Aelita: Queen Of Mars is however a very early and very remarkable example of the breed. It was also the first Soviet science fiction movie.

The music to accompany the film was composed by Dmitri Shostakovich.

It was based on Alexei Tolstoy’s 1923 novel Aelita. It should be added that Alexei Tolstoy was a very distant relative of Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace.

Strange signals are being picked up at a Moscow radio station. They seem to be coming from Mars. They cannot be deciphered but they do suggest that there is an advanced civilisation on Mars.

Engineer Los (Igor Ilyinsky) is is convinced his wife is having an affair, which leads to unfortunate results.

Los is obsessed by those signals from Mars and he is determined to build a spaceship and travel to the Red Planet.

The Martians are meanwhile very much aware of the existence of an advanced civilisation on Earth. They have built an advanced viewing device (much much more than a simple telescope). Aelita, the Queen of Mars, is obsessed by what she sees of Earth society.

It’s a clever idea and Tolstoy’s novel is excellent. Unfortunately the movie does not focus sufficiently on the science fiction story. An enormous amount of the early part of the movie is devoted to tedious social drama. There’s also an attempt at satire, with corrupt bureaucrats being pilloried, which is interesting. This would hardly have been allowed once Stalin had consolidated his position.

It’s interesting that Alexei Tolstoy initially opposed the Russian Revolution but later became an ardent supporter of the Soviet regime. The novel has its political moments but they’re handled in an interesting way with some touches of cynicism.

The movie dabbles a great deal in politics and towards the end becomes crude propaganda.

The movie also adds an irrelevant subplot regarding a bumbling amateur detective.

A lot of attention is devoted to Engineer Los’s marriage. This is an important aspect of the novel, explaining much about Los’s motivations, but it is dealt with in way too much detail in the movie.

This is a movie that needed to be severely pruned. The first half of the movie could easily have been cut by 30 minutes. We get brief snippets of the science fiction plot intercut will long meandering stretches dealing in intricate details with a whole lot of stuff we don’t need to know and don’t care about.

While this movie does have some very real flaws it offers a lot of compensations. The art direction by Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky is stunning. The sets are amazing. The influence of the Constructivist movement in the visual arts is very obvious - this is like a Constructivist painting come to life which is wild since Constructivism was an abstract art movement. Alexandra Exter’s costume designs are insane, but in a good way.

This is a visually magnificent movie which invents its own distinctive science fiction aesthetic, radically different from the aesthetic of Fritz Lang’s German silent science fiction films. There is no other movie that looks quite like Aelita: Queen Of Mars. In fact there is no other movie that looks even remotely like this one.

Yuliya Solntseva’s strange and exaggerated performance as Aelita works for me. It makes her seem genuinely alien. Aelita looks like an Earth woman but of course she comes from a radically different culture.

So there is much to admire here. The problem is that the narrative is a total mess and the ending is catastrophically bad. It has some of the most superb visuals you will ever see. But as a movie it’s simply awful. It’s difficult to know what to say in terms of a recommendation. The visuals are so good that anyone with an interest in cinema will want to see them. But it’s such a bad movie. It’s a terrible movie that looks fantastic.

The old Kino DVD offers a reasonable transfer. This is a movie that needs a new full restoration. Judging by the DVD the source materials are still in fairly good shape so a restoration should be possible.

I’ve reviewed Alexei Tolstoy’s novel Aelita elsewhere (and the novel is vastly superior to the movie).

Lola Montès (1955)

Lola Montès was the final film of German-born director Max Ophüls. Or at least it was the last film he completed himself.

An immensely expensive and ambitious Franco-German co-production it failed at the box office and was heavily re-cut despite the objections of the director. The first serious attempt to restore the movie to reflect Max Ophüls’ intentions was in 1968. A second more ambitious attempt was made in 2008. That’s the version released by Criterion on DVD and Blu-Ray and that’s the version reviewed here.

It is of course the story of Lola Montez, perhaps the most notorious woman of the 19th century. Actress, dancer, courtesan, mistress of kings and geniuses. Her real-life story was extraordinary but the story of the making of this movie was pretty extraordinary as well.

Ophüls was not the first choice of the producers. They apparently had Jacques Tourneur in mind. They had grandiose plans. The film would be an international co-production and would be shot simultaneously in French, German and English. They obviously needed a multi-lingual director. Ophüls qualified on that count and the fact that he had made movies in so many different countries made him an even more attractive choice.

Ophüls wasn’t interested but he become interested when he started reading up on Lola Montez. But the producers wanted the movie shot in colour. Ophüls had never worked in colour and was appalled by the prospect. They also wanted it shot in Cinemascope, which also appalled the director.

The producers then did one of those things that seem like good ideas at the time. They told the director not to stress about money. He could spend as much as he liked. Bad idea. Ophüls spent a breathtaking amount of money. The movie went way over schedule.

The movie was a disaster at the box office. It’s not hard to see why when you watch the movie as Ophüls originally made it. It’s wildly unconventional. The sort of movie that bewilders mainstream audiences, and attracts negative reviews from mainstream critics. This is an experimental avant-garde art film made on a blockbuster budget. It’s the kind of outrageous movie that would later be associated with Ken Russell or David Lynch. Ophüls throws the whole idea of a linear narrative out the window.

There are extended flashbacks but without any narrative coherence. It’s all very stream-of-consciousness. There are few concessions to realism. The circus sequences, which are the heart and soul of the movie, are pure fantasy concoctions having zero connection to any event in Montez’s life. It’s actually very Ken Russell.

The movie starts with Lola in a circus. She has become a kind of freak show, displayed as if she were a wild beast, a man-eating tigress. She provides entertainment for the crowd by answering questions about her scandalous life. These trigger the flashbacks but they’re not in any kind of chronological order. She also does a trapeze act!

We see snippets of Lola’s youth, of her first marriage, her affair with the composer Liszt and her celebrated and notorious affair with King Ludwig I of Bavaria.

The big issue for a lot of people is the performance of Martine Carol as Lola. Ophüls didn’t want her. I don’t blame him. She does her best and she’s really by no means bad but she just does not have the charisma and the glamour that was needed. She also does not have the erotic allure. Lola was a woman who made her living from her sexual allure. A king ruined himself and his kingdom for her. Martine Carol just does not succeed in convincing us that this is a woman for whom rich powerful men would sacrifice everything.

Peter Ustinov (an actor I’ve always disliked) is superb as the ringmaster. He’s not just the ringmaster of the circus. He has become the ringmaster of Lola’s life. He is no mere exploiter. He loves Lola. He is devoted to her. I have to admit that Ustinov nails this tricky part extremely well.

Anton Walbrook (a bit of a favourite with Ophüls) is excellent as King Ludwig.

If you’re expecting a conventional movie you’re likely to be baffled and alienated. But it is as I said earlier rather like the movies of crazed visionaries like Ken Russell and David Lynch (with perhaps a slight dash of Josef von Sternberg’s obsessive pursuit of style). You just have to go with it. If you do that then it’s an intoxicating experience filled with wild visual splendours. The shot compositions are dazzling. The colours are stunning. The sets are magnificent. Ophüls couldn’t find a circus big enough to encompass his vision so he built one.

Lola Montès is what you get when you give a crazed genius a blank cheque. It’s a strange flawed masterpiece. Very highly recommended.

After leaving Hollywood and settling in France Ophüls only made four movies but they were certainly memorable. I’ve also reviewed La Ronde (1950) which is in its own way equally unconventional in its rejection of conventional narrative.