Lola Montès

Lola Montès is a 1955 historical romance film and the last completed film of German-born director Max Ophüls. Based on the novel La vie extraordinaire de Lola Montès by Cécil Saint-Laurent, the film depicts the life of Irish dancer and courtesan Lola Montez (1821–1861), portrayed by Martine Carol, and tells the story of the most famous of her many notorious affairs, those with Franz Liszt and Ludwig I of Bavaria. A co-production between France and West Germany, the dialogue is mostly in French and German, with a few English-language sequences. The most expensive European film produced up to its time, Lola Montès underperformed at the box office. However, it had an important artistic influence on the French New Wave cinema movement and continues to have many distinguished critical admirers. Heavily re-edited (multiple times) and shortened after its initial release for commercial reasons, it has been twice restored (1968, 2008). It was released on DVD and Blu-ray in North America by The Criterion Collection in February 2010.