What Ophüls wants...: Lola Montès on DVD

It is perhaps too easy to dismiss the celebrity whose ascent is fueled by dubious artistic talent and “mere” sex appeal. Is the cultivation of celebrity not a talent in itself? We never actually see the eponymous heroine of Lola Montès (1955) exhibit her ostensible skills as dancer or singer. While her story is framed by a dazzlingly baroque circus act of which she is both star and subject, she barely addresses her public, leaving the extolling of her legacy to Peter Ustinov’s wonderfully cynical ringmaster, who introduces her as “a bloodthirsty monster with the eyes of an angel.”

The real Lola, née Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, Irish-born, Spanish by shtick, dancer and actress by trade, mistress to powerful men by vocation, never toured the world in quite such spectacularly self-objectifying fashion as is depicted in this, Max Ophüls’ final masterpiece, mangled upon its initial release, newly restored in all its unspeakable gorgeousness, and now available from the Criterion Collection. The movie, which can be called a bio-pic in only the loosest sense, plays jazz over the very foggy historical facts of Montès’ life, yet Ophüls evokes truths that more fact-based accounts could never hope to grasp. The project was originally meant to be more modest, but as the producers insisted on hoisting such intrusions as Technicolor, Cinemascope and sex goddess Martine Carol upon Ophüls—who utilized each of these items masterfully—Lola Montès increasingly became a kind of critique of itself. As Marcel Ophüls, the director’s son, said, the more they tried to turn the project into a grandiose commercial spectacle, the more Lola Montès became a movie about grandiose commercial spectacle. See Lola being serenaded by Franz Liszt in a horse-drawn carriage the size of a Winnebago as they glide through rural Italy; see Lola bid farewell to Anton Walbrook’s King Ludwig and escape a Bavarian uprising by being ushered through a labyrinth of catacombs by a lovesick young Oskar Werner; see Lola dive from the peak of the big top way down onto a little mattress placed by an army of acrobatic multi-colored midgets…

We see Lola whisked through numerous opulent settings, always beautiful, sumptuously costumed, and a little melancholy, always captured by Ophüls’ relentlessly mobile cameras, their fluid movements emphasizing the transitory nature of being and the sweep of memory and theatre. But we never see inside Lola’s heart and mind. Two hours after being regaled of her feats of seduction we hardly know a thing about her, hardly penetrate her exquisite exterior. If this feels uncomfortably like vacuous pageantry, well, that’s kind of the idea. This is biography as high wire act, with Ophüls concocting one breathtaking, elaborately staged episode after another, and the sadness of it all accumulates only in the margins. It’s a bizarre cinematic experience, audacious, enthralling, and frustrating. There’s nothing like Lola Montès. It cries out for the big screen, but Criterion’s package is the best possible substitute, and the extras are terrific. It’s their fourth such packaging of Ophüls’ French output. I’m now crossing my fingers that they’ll start dipping into his underrated Hollywood films.

From fettered youth to youthful folly: two by François Truffaut

We have so few portraits of innocence like that of Antoine Doniel, who in his inarticulate stare alone combined undigested emotional damage with a spirited will toward childish anarchy that no amount of stern punishment seems able to fully repress. With his neglectful parents, impatient teachers and paucity of friends, he’s essentially alone in the movie, receiving lasting consolation only from the camera, or mise-en-scène if you prefer, itself, which fixed so memorably, so dazzlingly, on his physiognomy in that famous final shot, freezing the child in time just as he wades out to sea, escaping from the accumulation of bad turns alluded to in the film’s marquee-ready title. He’s played by the remarkable Jean-Pierre Léaud, who got the part by answering an ad in the paper. He was 14 at the time, pretty young to make this kind of impression, but his director trumped him—he was only 27.

One of a remarkable triumvirate of movies that gave birth to the French New Wave, The 400 Blows (1959), the autobiographical feature debut of critic-turned-filmmaker François Truffaut, is creeping up on its 50th birthday, yet it possesses a freshness and sense of freedom that still radiates from the screen. The sentimentality that clung to certain later Truffaut's can be sniffed out—Jean Constantin’s lovely music emphasizes this—but here it feels appropriate. The experiences addressed are raw enough to render the movie nimble, and frequently fun. We root for the preservation of Antoine’s delinquency. We watch him pass through his rituals of truancy and mis-education, of familial obligation and alienation, of developing awareness of adult unhappiness and dread, and Rebel Without a Cause (55) seems like it must have been from another age, or maybe it would have felt more palpably real if they’d shaved a decade off its lead. Maybe the French simply knew how to get at a brutishness in youth that Hollywood naturally molded into melodrama. Brilliant melodrama, but melodrama nonetheless. 

I saw both The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim (62), Truffaut’s third feature, when I was around 20. The former meant everything to me, while the latter struck me as more kooky or historically important than truly moving. When I see the films now my response is almost the reverse, with the former playing as still affecting if relatively less startling, and the latter revealing more depth and wisdom than its formal exuberance and inspired artifice initially promised. Both hit Edmonton's Metro Cinema this weekend in a Truffaut double-bill, so I guess comparison is inevitable, even between such heights. There’s a scene in Jules and Jim where the three central characters traipse through the wilderness playing a game which has them searching for the last signs of civilization. If given the choice between finding a copy of The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim to carry with me through some post-civilized world, I’d have to go with Jules and Jim.

The source material comes from Henri-Pierre Roché, whose artistic flowering occurred at the opposite end of adulthood from Truffaut’s—he was 73 when he wrote Jules and Jim, his first novel. Like Truffaut’s first film, Roché’s debut was autobiographical, but its telescopic perspective, looking 50 years into the past, laces the events with a heady mix of vitality and nostalgia, partially because its able to regard suffering with sheer admiration for youthful folly. The story, which begins on the cusp of World War I, is only partly about the titular characters. Jules (Oskar Werner), a German, and Jim (Henri Serre), a Frenchman, meet and become nearly instant friends, inseparable, even dressing alike, forming something like a platonic marriage. They meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau, whose extraordinary beauty was complicated by the darkness around her eyes that made her never seem exactly young), who enters the movie as a sort of magical creature, the living embodiment of an ancient sculpture the friends both adored. On their first afternoon adventure with Catherine she dresses in drag and Jim draws a moustache on her face. It is clear from the start who’ll wear the pants in this threesome.

Years later, after the friends fight on opposing sides in the war, Jules will marry Catherine and move to the country, while Jim tries to maintain an ostensibly bohemian bachelorhood. But the friends need to share everything, and when Catherine’s instability comes to wreak havoc on Jules’ quiet life the time comes for the romance between Catherine and Jim that always seemed inevitable. For a time the three live in uneasy harmony, in a house with many bedrooms and a daughter who takes her abundance of parents in stride. The actors are so beautifully cast that they make this chaotic equation, a prelude to the sexual inhibitions to come later in the decade, feel utterly natural. The movie is partly about Moreau’s siren-like, enigmatic allure, which it never dares to penetrate, and in fact needn’t. But it’s just as dependent on the friends’ unnerving sense of individual completion only through merging, something so well conveyed that by the time Jules it left alone in the world it’s impossible to imagine how he’ll go on. Maybe that’s why the movie ends so abruptly.

Truffaut’s recklessly inventive approach was a masterstroke. With a deliriously fragmentary editing strategy he careens through the story’s lengthy chronology at a galloping pace, while making constant stops to revel in epiphanies. He makes a clamorous parade of Thérèse (Marie Dubois) playing “steam engine” with her cigarette. He lets us luxuriate for the entirety of the song performed by Moreau and Boris Bassiak. He takes the reception of a letter as an opportunity to stage a strange, dreamlike sequence where Moreau’s face appears in the centre of a sweeping shot of a passing rural landscape. And he cuts through the frenetic with a voice-over that, juxtaposed against moments of stillness, reminds us how uncontainable the past can seem. In some ways it’s even more youthful and undisciplined than The 400 Blows, but its dizzying detours are so elegantly of a piece, a full expression of a very particular method of storytelling that makes a whipped-up jazz of life and finds an emotional truth in the very blur of things. It stops you in your tracks, hoists you up on the ride and sends you over the edge before you’ve caught your breath. A treasure.

The Birth of the Cold

Peering out from below a broad, heavy brow, he has the pale face of a man thoroughly eaten up inside. The London he moves in looks damp, grey and bone-chilling. He wears his trench coat tucked up around him like a blanket, and puts away half a bottle of whiskey a day. He has no friends and speaks as little as he can get away with. He takes a menial clerical job at the library for the Candahar Institute for Psychical Research, where he works alongside a pretty, confident young woman. She explains to him what lycanthropy means in a weirdly sexy way that suggests he might just be some sort of werewolf, and she likes the idea. What matters, perhaps, is that he is so clearly someone other than he claims to be. It may just be the starkest romance in movies, and it really works.

But I’m jumping ahead. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965) actually begins with Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) stalking Checkpoint Charlie, waiting for a man to cross over on a bicycle. A tense piano, Satie-esque, plays over the barbed wire, flood lights and brick. Things won’t go well. The photography is black and white, and this Berlin seems to have forgotten about things like trees—this is one Cold War movie that looks irredeemably cold. Leamas will soon be back in London, where he visits Control (Cyril Cusack) and takes a new assignment that will keep him “out in the cold,” pretending to defect in a ploy to turn one German intelligence agent against another. The brief period of work at the library was only meant as a fleeting ruse, but Leamas’ unexpected connection with Nan (Claire Bloom), who, in a tidy bit of dramatic irony, is a card-carrying communist, will complicate that. We know how these things go. It’s a spy movie, and thus perpetually mired in the forbidding causality that comes with the milieu: everything complicates everything. Everyone is a pawn of some sort.

John le Carré’s third novel, released two years previously, was a sensation, de-glamorizing the world of intelligence just as Bond was cashing in at the box office, yet so brimming with intrigue, brutality and human frailty, courting our appetite for dirty little secrets, that no one bothered to notice how wildly bleak it was. At least until they saw Martin Ritt’s movie of it, which failed to startle in the same way, though it earned Oscar nods. But The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is now available in a deluxe two-disc edition from Criterion. I just saw it for the first time, and what can I say? I’m startled. Ritt, who also made Hud (63), Hombre (67) and Norma Rae (79), may not have a reputation as a master stylist, or even a master of anything in particular, but here, in collaboration with cinematographer Oswald Morris, production designer Tambi Larsen and editor Anthony Harvey in particular, he produced something of marvelous texture and specificity. It’s transfixing.

Burton, whose Leamas now reads as part of the formula that gave birth to Daniel Craig’s Bond, may brood to excess for some—including, reportedly, Ritt—yet the character’s near-suicidal desperation, his immersion in his soul-crushing vocation, lies at the very heart of the story. And morose as Burton is, the overall gloom is greatly tempered by Bloom, so charming and smart, whose every nuance is so exactingly turned. She’s the sole woman in the movie, as well as the sole outsider to Leamas’ world, and she’s nearly its only source of warmth. Yet Oskar Werner, just a few years after Jules and Jim (62), plays Fiedler, a Jew in German intelligence with a massive grudge, and also possesses a certain air of inner life and excitement. And he also connects in his way with Leamas. Cusack, too, is wonderful, vampiric in his stillness, and so very English. So the cast inhabits rather than simply populates this world.

Ritt’s method of taking it all in includes a great deal of god’s eye views to heighten the alienation, balanced by two-shots that constantly emphasize the coded negotiations taking place in smallish rooms. The camera prowls, always. Lamps hang from chains in one location, from thorny antler-like mounts in another, all dangling with portent. There are beautifully timed fades to black, like the one near the start where Leamas sits with un-sipped tea in hand in Control’s office. Near the end there is a superb, ambiguously menacing exchange of gazes between Leamas and the ex-Nazi Mundt, and its after this exchange that we begin to understand how the whole narrative builds to a point of proving Nan’s ideological distinctions meaningless just as it completes Leamas’ moral perdition.

A highlight among Criterion’s supplements is a new interview with le Carré. He speaks very engagingly and has an endearingly refined way with gossip, stories about screenwriter Paul Dehn, who, matching le Carré’s own background as a British agent, was once a professional assassin; about various affairs between the collaborators and Liz Taylor's lurking in the background; about Ritt’s difficulties with Burton and how their antagonism might have been unconsciously nurtured by both of them so as to turn up the tension in the film. Le Carré also critiques the film quite soberly, and interestingly, believes that if anything it was too faithful to the source material. For myself, I couldn't help but wonder what it would have been like had the film started with Leamas taking his job at the library so that we initially knew nothing more about him than Nan does, and made our discoveries roughly in step with hers.