Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35342 in DVD
• Released on: 1999-02-23
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Letterboxed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 110 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Max Ophüls explores the scandalous life of dancer and courtesan Lola Montes with a bittersweet empathy that turns melodrama into a tragic melancholy masterpiece. Using the theatrical re-creation of Lola's life in a big-top pageant as a framing device, Ophüls contrasts the outrageous sensationalism of her reputation with poignant, poetic flashbacks that explore her many affairs, most notably with Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg) and King Ludwig of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook). Lola's greatest tragedy is that she loved well, if not too wisely. If Martine Carol's central performance is lacking passion, as many critics have argued, her quiet, at times seemingly passive demeanor makes her a veritable prisoner of her society and her reputation. Swept along by Ophüls's sweeping camerawork, which glides through the film in a balance of intimacy and contemplative remove as if on the wings of angels, her life becomes like a cinematic ballet with Ophüls the choreographer and conductor. Peter Ustinov costars as the jaded circus ringmaster, who nightly narrates her exploits to a throng of scandal-hungry spectators, while she performs with a face hardened in indifference, resigned to her empty role as a figure of spectacle in a garish gilded cage. Shot in delicate color and impeccably composed widescreen compositions throughout by Ophüls's regular cinematographer Christian Matras, Lola Montes is his most beautiful and restrained film, a fitting swan song for one of the cinema's most sensitive directors. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

BAD TRANSFER, BAD TRACK
I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw "Lola Montes", had made its way to DVD. I was so thrilled I couldn't get my money out fast enough. Of course, I took for granted that the negative had been restored and the telecine transfer had been made from a new 35mm interpositive on the Philips "Spirit". I also took for granted that the best audio facility would have been employed re-record the track of a film this important cinema history. Well, I was wrong on both counts and badly wrong at that. It's almost as though someone found a 16mm print that had been left outside in a garbage dump for twenty years and mastered it rather than go through the expense of restoring this masterpiece. It is simply the worst looking print and worst sounding track I have ever experienced on VHS or DVD. If you're hoping to see one of the world's great films beautifully restored and re-recorded, look somewhere else.

Terrible Print
I can hardly believe how bad the quality of the Fox-Lorber DVD version of this film is. I have the privilege of access to a local University library with an extensive laserdisc and DVD collection, so I was able to see both this DVD version and the criterion collection's out of print laserdisc edition of this film. The difference between the quality of the dated laserdisc and this DVD was like night and day - the laserdisc was incomporably better. Why Fox-Lorber does not simply pay for the Criterion print is beyond me. For Fox-Lorber to buy the DVD rights to this film and then release a version of such shamefully low quality is ridiculous - it seems to me alogical, as if though it would have made more sense for Fox-Lorber never to aquire the rights at all. In truth, because I enjoy this film so much, I feel that this DVD is an act of wanton cruelty on Fox Lorber's part. I would advise discriminating viewers to avoid this DVD; I despair because I can now not own a copy of the film for myself in the forseeable future.

Poor video quailty
The movie itself was great, but the transfer is extremly diaappointing, considering that Fox Lorber acquired it recently after Home Vision Cinema lost the video rights. Fox Lorber could have gone through new tranfers and a color and sound restoration, as they reportedly done with their new Truffaut releases on video and DVD (or it could've done by the French and picked up by convience and after Criterion lost their rights to the films, anyway, Fox Lorber claimed to have done "new translation").

The video and sound quailty is extremely poor that colors changed throughout a scene and the audio is quite low accompanied by tics and hisses. Fox Lorber did a disservice to everyone since this is the one and only source many of us have to watch the film. (As a side note, the director's cut, with a running time around 140 minutes, is rarely seen after it was butchered for a shorter running time since the production company was on the verge of bankruptcy as the movie failed to make any profit. This was done, sadly, when Ophuls was on his deathbed).