brief candles: Lola Montez (1821-1861)

    Lola Montès [videorecording (DVD)]. Gamma-Film prèsente un film de Max Ophuls; scenario de Max Ophuls; adaptation de Annette Wademant et Max Ophuls; dialogue de Jacques Natanson; une co-production Gamma, Florida, Union Films; producteur délégué, Albert Caraco. Criterion Collection, 2009. 2 videodiscs (114 min.). Based on the novel by Cécil Saint-Laurent. Originally produced as a motion picture in 1955.

   Performers: Martine Carol, Peter Ustinov, Anton Walbrook, Henry Guisol, Lise Delamare, Paulette Dubost, Oskar Werner, Jean Galland, Will Quadflieg, Helena Manson, Germaine Delbat, Jacques Fayet, Friedrich Domin, Werner Finck, Ivan Desny. Summary: The life of the notorious showgirl who had affairs with kings, became a courtesan, and traveled the world trying to fit in. Charts the course of Montès's scandalous past through the invocations of the bombastic ringmaster of the American circus where she has ended up performing


whatever Lola wants ...

   The woman we know today as Lola  Montez was actually of impeccable British pedigree, having been born in Ireland as Eliza Rosanna Gilbert to well-to-do upper middle class parents: her father was a career officer in the King’s army and her mother’s father a member of Parliament. Most decidedly she did not descend from a Spanish noble family, as she later would claim. But somehow along the way the deception stuck, and she metamorphosed, spectacularly, into the more modish and exotic identity of ‘Lola Montez.’

   She was best known as a notorious dancer but from all accounts wasn’t very good. As if to compensate she cometimes danced naked. She was also an actress but apparently couldn’t act. More to the point, she was the century’s most notorious femme fatale before the term existed. Indeed some sources say the phrase had to be invented to describe Lola.

   If contemporary portraits and vintage photographs are any indication she was an attractive woman but not really a great beauty, at least by Twentieth and Twenty-first Century ideals of female physical perfection. But like Cleopatra she had something that inspired various male suitors – rich, famous and otherwise – to seek out her company, often with unfortunate consequences for the suitor, Lola too sometimes. Anyhow, and to invoke Twentieth Century comparisons further, Lola might be described as a Nineteenth Century version of Marilyn Monroe, Bettie Page and Eva Peron all rolled into one, with more than a touch of the Gabor sisters. In a word she was famous for being famous.

   Accordingly Lola’s life had numerous permutations, convolutions, confluences and connections. Classical music buffs glimpse her as one of Franz Liszt’s many amours. Other liaisons included author Alexander Dumas, newspaper publisher Alexandre Dujarier, and King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Herein another, albeit tenuous, connection with Liszt. Ludwig’s grandson, later King Ludwig II, was a near fanatical admirer of Richard Wagner’s operas. Wagner just happened to be Liszt’s son-in-law, having married Liszt’s daughter Cosima. Indeed some sources claim that Lola had a fling with Wagner himself, though this is doubtful. By all accounts Wagner met Lola only briefly and didn’t much like her.

   Her liaison with Ludwig I created a furor at court and resulted in the king’s eventual abdication. Thus with her star fading fast in Europe Lola in the early 1850s moved to America and eventually made her way to the bawdy environs of San Francisco in the Gold Rush days. Lola was an immediate succès de scandale in America, with one of the more sensationalist stories about her being, apropos her fiery ‘Latin’ temperament, that she whipped a German policeman who had offended her. She later disowned the story but it’s a great story all the same, so much so that she always carried the horse-whip onstage during performances to discourage men from treating her disrespectfully. As her popularity waned she took her shtick to smaller mining towns in northern California and eventually made a tour of Australia.

   Lola returned to the United States again in 1856. At this point, only 34 years old and in poor health she turned to spirituality and lived quietly in New York, mostly doing charity work for homeless women, until her death from complications of pneumonia and syphilis at age 39 in 1861.

   Lola’s tempestuous life and career has been essayed by most every art form and entertainment medium, but film connoisseurs best remember her from the 1955 widescreen extravaganza Lola Montès, directed by legendary German auteur Max Ophuls, with Martine Carol in the title role.

   Mirroring the woman herself the film Lola Montès has had a bumpy evolution. From its riotous, scandalous premieres in 1955 – accompanied by mixed, mostly negative, reviews – to its gradual comeback, it has survived various studio-imposed cuts and revisions, finally receiving a glorious and much deserved full restoration in 2008. Still, Lola has polarized fans and critics since its first screening nearly seven decades ago. Jacques Rivette and Francois Truffaut praised the film on its initial release, and in 1963 the eminent American critic Andrew Sarris famously proclaimed it the greatest movie of all time [1], surely an exaggeration but not that far off the mark. Moreover Lola is getting further, more recent, critical love: in 2012 the film received five votes in the BFI/Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time, which might place it as a low grade honorable mention but nonetheless a sign of its growing critical acceptance.

   Today Ophuls is the cult director par excellence and Lola Montès his cult movie of choice by devotees (even if his The Earrings of Madame de … remains the critical darling). Indeed if we grant that Lola Montès is an art movie then it’s not hyperbole to describe it as one of the half dozen or so greatest art movies ever.
   Hitherto best known for appearing in French boudoir farces in the 1950s, Martine Carol is the perfect embodiment of Lola, a little too much as it turned out. As though providence itself had been tempted Miss Carol was struck down by cardiac arrest in 1967 at the youthful age of forty-six.

[1] Mr. Sarris seems to have had second thoughts given his subsequent reflections on the ‘greatest films.’

brief candles: Maria Callas (1923-1977)

   Maria by Callas [videorecording (DVD)]. Sony Pictures Classics release; Elephant Doc, Petit Dragon and Unbeldi Productions present; a film by Tom Volf. Originally released as a motion picture in 2017.  Wide screen (16x9, 1.78:1). Special features: Q&A with director Tom Volf; trailers. Editing, Janice Jones; archive colorization, Samuel Francois-Steiniger; reader, Joyce DiDonato.
    Summary: A portrait of one of history's most extraordinarily talented women. Told through private letters, unpublished memoirs, performances and TV interviews, the film is the first to tell the life story of the legendary Greek-American opera singer completely in her own words with never-before-seen footage.

   Hamlet told us the play’s the thing, but when we turn our attentions to classical music, the composer is king. Not a perfect analogy perhaps, but the point is thus: that musical performers, no matter how gifted, might rightly be dubbed the art form’s second-tier talents. However … there are exceptions, and a handful of strictly performing musicians are deserving of the epithet genius, and on this very short and select list certainly belongs Maria Callas.

   One of the characteristics of genius is that it breaks new ground, allowing us to see – and hear – the world in different, more exciting ways. And indeed while Callas is, deservingly so, given a large amount of credit for the revival of interest in the bel canto repertoire, her influence on opera extended in ways far outside the purely musical.

   She was a great actress in an era when acting ability wasn’t the big draw, reminding us that the singer must look, and act, the part [1]. Moreover, she always insisted on high standards of production. For Callas, an opera would only work if it was conceived and presented as a total theatrical experience. But the sword cut both ways, with ironic results. In the past half century or so, better and more innovative productions have led to the primacy of the stage director, along with the subsequent demotion of singers and conductors.

   There was also Callas the pop culture phenomenon. The always immaculately coiffed and dressed diva came to embody the cult of glamour and celebrity as it blossomed in the post World War II years, though in fairness she’s probably a reflection of this trend, rather than causal factor.

 

   In any case the documentary Maria by Callas alternates between Callas the woman and Callas the artist, and sometimes we’re not sure where one ends and the other begins. There are lots of readings from her diary and personal correspondence, as well as interviews, plus of course arias (happily, presented in their entirety). Also rare video footage, much in, albeit sometimes colorized, color. Not so surprising, we learn that Callas was a complex woman: relentlessly pursued by pesky reporters and photographers, she suffered their unwanted attentions with grace and patience, most of the time anyway. On the other hand, for such an intensely private person, she was an eminently available interview subject.

   The chronology of Maria by Callas is a little vague. It jumps around a lot, and, most regrettable, there’s very little of her early years when she essayed even Wagner, and by all accounts, very well. The heaviness of those these years didn’t confine itself to repertoire; it’s said Callas shed up to eighty pounds to attain her svelte, echt-Fifties look (some sources say it was closer to sixty pounds).

   Musically a couple of numbers stand out: a soulful, lyric “Casta Diva” from a gala Paris performance, and even more so, the “Habanera” from Carmen (not sure of the venue here), in which she’s arguably more secure technically than almost anything else on the DVD. Her performance gives us a tantalizing glimpse of how strong a singer and how electric a performer Maria Callas really was. Her mezzo-like vocal timbre and fiery temperament seemed ready made for the role. Besides, she seems to be having just a plain good time singing the part, and it’s our loss she never performed Carmen onstage.

   Callas wasn’t an intellectual, but there’s a cerebral sheen to her answers to interviewers’ questions as she walks a fine line between the candid and the guarded, brilliantly so. And then there’s the accent, mid-Atlantic and always with a touch of the exotic. There’s one incident when Callas actually loses her cool. Predictably it’s when she goes into a tirade against Metropolitan Opera general manager Rudolf Bing over what she feels are the Met’s poor productions. Here we get a glimpse of La Callas at her tempestuous best, or is it worst? In either case, it only tends to humanize her and make her all the more attractive.

   Criticisms of Maria by Callas for its rather sketchy, patchy structure and relentlessly pro-Callas tone, especially the stacked deck, first-person only narration, are well taken. Thus I’ll defer to others to opine whether this is the best Callas documentary out there. But considered on its own merits, it’s a unique historical artifact for the rare footage, musical excerpts and best of all, Maria Callas on La Callas in her own words.

   Opera fans are an opinionated lot. Passions run high, and nothing gets an enthusiast’s back up like discussions of the ‘best’ singers, and no opera diva of the Twentieth Century ever inspired passions in the same way that Maria Callas did. Criticized, even vilified during her peak years in the mid and late Fifties, nonetheless even in her own lifetime the pendulum swung back and within a few years the Callas comeback was complete, as witnessed by the ecstatic reception of her return to the Met to sing Tosca, as well as the enthusiastic crowds during her final tour with tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano.

   Her posthumous reputation only increases and her legend continues to grow: today La Callas the musician and cultural phenomenon occupies a unique niche as quasi-divinity for devotees and even casual fans (not for nothing that she’s often referred to as La Divina). The documentary Maria by Callas is a unique and fitting tribute to its eminently worthy subject, and moreover serves to remind us that indeed Maria has gotten in the last word.

  [1] Callas was such a natural as an actress that we're the poorer that she only appeared in one feature film, Medea (1970).
 

Callas as Medea