Elsewhere on this site, you will find a 3000-word piece on this film. However, since I have just added it to my 100 Greatest Films List, which you will also find elsewhere on this blog, I have composed the following 300-word entry for inclusion in that list: In early twentieth-century Paris, Louise (Danielle Darrieux, sublime), […]
Tag Archives: Max Ophüls
This famous film by Max Ophüls is redeemed some twenty years later by his Lola Montès (1955). Nothing less than his most brilliant (and final) work could manage such a redemption. La signora di tutti is one of several 1930s films that Ophüls, a German Jew, made in other European countries following Hitler’s ascension to […]
Lola Montès, Max Ophüls’s final, uneven, but intermittently most brilliant film, projects twentieth-century self-objectification and selfconsciousness back into the nineteenth to address the emergence of the idea of celebrity. Its case in point is an actual celebrity, Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, a.k.a. Lola Montès, ersatz dancer, acrobat, and scandalous lover, including of King Ludwig […]
First things first. If (like me) you know Max Ophüls’s Le plaisir from its U.S. version, you need to rearrange the order of the Maupassant stories in your head, and you need to imagine Jean Servais narrating in lieu of Peter Ustinov, who does so (irritatingly) in English. The long segment, about the Parisian brothel […]
From Arthur Schnitzler’s play Reigen Max Ophüls has created a rueful, wistful meditation on the transience of love, implicitly, life’s transience. It is love’s merry-go-round suited to a waltz—a haunting waltz by Oscar Straus. More: the film itself is a waltz, lovely, lilting, passing, passing into sadness and melancholy: the inevitable end to a waltz. […]
Dennis Grunes 