Lola Montès · reception & legacy
1955 · Max Ophüls
How Lola Montès has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
One of cinema's most famous flop-to-masterpiece stories: booed at its 1955 Paris premiere and butchered by producers into a shorter chronological cut, it was championed for decades by cinephiles before a 2008 restoration returned Ophüls's version to something like its intended glory.
What's debated
The eternal debate is Martine Carol — miscast blank at the centre of a masterpiece, or is her opacity exactly the point of a film about a woman turned into a spectacle?
Its footprint
Andrew Sarris's declaration that it is 'the greatest film of all time' is one of the most quoted lines in all of film criticism, and the image of Peter Ustinov's ringmaster presiding over the circus has become shorthand for cinema-as-spectacle itself.
Where it stands
A Sight & Sound-poll fixture and Criterion jewel — Ophüls's final film is a cinephile rite of passage, the 'greatest flop' every serious watcher eventually gets to.