Max Ophüls – “Lola Montès” (1955)
A lavish 140 minute opus in ravishing Cinemascope (the director’s only film in color), filled with countless extras and opulent sets, German director Ophüls‘ ambitious swan song was the most expensive French film made up until that time. Told in flashback, “Lola Montès” is a tragic and fictionalized biography of a scandalized 19th century courtesan reduced to being a dancer and circus sideshow freak because of her “outrageous and indecent” exploits (one too many paramours). In the present, the aged and ill-healthed Montès (Martine Carol) is exploited and put on display by a manipulative, P.T. Barnum-esque ringmaster played by Peter Ustinov. As the performance begins—the ringmaster regaling the audience with tales of her various lovers and sexual conquests—Montès flashes back on her past through the experiences with an assortment of men. Notoriously fond of long and elaborate tracking shots, dollies and cranes, while all of those elements are present, Ophüls rarely calls attention to cinematic flourishes, instead using such techniques to enrapture you beyond the gorgeous and plush visuals. Its technical radiance and production design brilliance are easily admirable, sure. But the gracefulness of each flashback and the building, cyclical nature of each spoiled relationship—each one featuring its own hardship and pain—forms to create an emotionally wrenching portrait of a woman distressed to the point of resignation. Audiences couldn’t handle the bold flashback structure at the time and the movie was quickly butchered into a more linear fashion, but a lovingly restored version was unveiled in 2008 cementing Ophüls reputation as the master who had awed Stanley Kubrick himself. Ophüls did embark on one more film afterwards, 1958’s “The Lovers of Montparnasse,” but he died midway through the picture and it was largely finished by his friend Jacques Becker who ultimately got the final film credit. [B+]
Orson Welles -“F for Fake” (1974)
Orson Welles‘ career, marred by his reputation for completion anxiety, is the stuff of classic, even mythic tragedy: the boy wunderkind of radio, given the carte blanche keys to Hollywood, creates a bonafide masterpiece, but through years of constant conflict, uphill battles and studio meddling, would end his career as a shell of a man; a joke known for drunken outtakes in trivial TV commercials said forever to be lamenting the butchering of his opus “The Magnificent Ambersons.” But what a way to end that checkered career, with the inventive, brilliant and mischievous masterpiece and faux doc “F For Fake” (his filmography has a few subsequent titles, but they’re mostly making-of docs and shorts). We’re told early on that it will contain only an hour of truth, with the rest existing as pure fiction. “Up to your old tricks, I see?” says a woman (Oja Kodar) leaning out of a train car as she watches Orson deliver this opening disclaimer—part of a whimsical, mysterious, and funny sequence that sets the tone for what’s to come. “Of course. I’m a charlatan,” replies Welles with a grin. Beginning as a BBC project about art forger Elmyr de Hory, and fabulist biographer Clifford Irving that Welles was only supposed to narrate, the filmmaker took over the project, and turned it into something quite different, and quite remarkable—a meta-tastic, undoubtedly self-indulgent and self-satisfied examination of fraudulence. Welles is on top impish form in ‘Fake,’ and his playfulness only enhances its themes, with the question of authorship used to highlight how we perceive art and its makers. It’s a dense, unclassifiable and grandiose lark, but hugely entertaining too, even as its digressions occasionally spin off into dead ends. “Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing,” Welles recommends. And even though it occurs well over the hour of truth, the director poignantly shows you that sometimes reality doesn’t matter. There could be one more Orson Welles movie if “The Other Side Of The Wind” is ever released, but this bold experiment of form and puckish examination of the subjective nature of truth is one for the ages. [A]
Honorable Mentions: Of course, we could have gone on forever with these (and if enough people read it, we’d love to do a follow-up piece—you know where the share buttons are…). But to name but a few of the notables (all men, depressingly, but that’s the first 100 years of cinema for you) that nearly made the cut, there’s Ozu’s “An Autumn Afternoon,” Rossellini’s “The Messiah,” Renoir’s “The Elusive Corporal,” Kazan’s “The Last Tycoon,” Hal Ashby’s “8 Million Ways To Die,” Antonioni’s “Beyond The Clouds,” Visconti’s “The Innocent,” Howard Hawks’ “Rio Lobo,” Preston Sturges’ “The French, They Are A Funny Race,” Sidney Lumet’s “Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead,” Visconti’s “The Innocent” and Bunuel’s “That Obscure Object Of Desire.”
And that’s without mentioning D.W. Griffith’s “The Struggle,” Eisenstein’s “Ivan The Terrible Part II,” Mizoguchi’s “Street Of Shame,” Claude Chabrol’s “Bellamy,” Resnais’ “Life Of Riley,” Bob Fosse’s “Star 80,” Pasolini’s “Salo, or the 120 Days Of Sodom,” Vincente Minnelli’s “A Matter Of Time,” Michael Powell’s “The Boy Who Turned Yellow,” Cecil B. De Mille’s “The Ten Commandments,” Otto Preminger‘s “The Human Factor,” and countless, countless others.
— Jessica Kiang & Oli Lyttelton, with Rodrigo Perez
