Sammy Davis Jr. in A Man Called Adam on DVD
Wim Wender's Paris, Texas on DVD
14th Annual Kansas Silent Film Festival - Feb. 26 & 27
Bad Girls of Film Noir, Vol. 2 on DVD
Bad Girls of Film Noir, Vol. 1 on DVD
Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy on DVD

LOLA MONTES, The Definite Restoration at Film Forum, Oct. 10-30, Official Selection of 2008 Cannes, Telluride, & New York Film Festivals

Max Ophüls’ legendary Lola Montès (1955), in a definitive new 35mm color and CinemaScope restoration that was a highlight this year at Cannes and Telluride — and is the spotlight retrospective at this year’s New York Film Festival — will have its theatrical premiere at Film Forum from Friday, October 10 through Thursday, October 30. Showtimes daily are at 1:00, 3:15, 5:30, 7:45, and 10:00.

In a garishly colored circus, the suckers line up at a buck a kiss with celebrated adventuress Lola (French sex symbol Martine Carol), as ringmaster Peter Ustinov starts his spiel and the flashbacks begin. Ophüls’ final work — and his only movie in color and widescreen — was the biggest-budgeted French film to date, with his always-mobile camera gliding, tilting, and craning amid dazzling sets and costumes, as the oscillation between the tawdriness of the circus and the romanticism of the flashbacks underscores the difference between reality and memory, each flashback with its own color scheme.

Arguably Ophüls’ masterpiece, Lola was a flop on first release and subjected to a brutal butchering by its producers, who hacked up the original negative and re-arranged its complex structure chronologically. After their eventual bankruptcy, legendary New Wave producer Pierre Braunberger (Shoot the Piano Player) acquired the rights and issued a limited restoration to great acclaim in 1969.

But restoration technology has progressed dramatically in the intervening 40 years and many more materials — including the innovative original sound mix — have since turned up. In 2006, Braunberger’s daughter Laurence and the Cinémathèque Française, with the support of the Thomson Foundation, the Franco-American Cultural Fund, and Ophüls’ son Marcel, embarked on a state of the art restoration. Scratches, tears and missing frames were fixed and the full stereophonic magnetic track was restored and remastered in Dolby Digital, with the vibrant hues as conceived by production designer Jean d’Eaubonne and cinematographer Christian Matras replacing the washed-out existing prints and videos. The original CinemaScope ratio of 2.55:1 has also been restored (later prints were made in the narrower ratio of 2.35:1, cropping off image on the left and right of the screen), along with five minutes of long-unseen footage.

A sensation at both Cannes and Telluride this year, the ravishing new restoration is also the spotlight retrospective at the 2008 New York Film Festival (tickets for that screening sold out instantly). It is the only film to have been selected for the New York Film Festival three times: for the very first NYFF in 1963, again in 1969 (in an earlier, not so successful, restoration), and this year. It was following the 1963 festival screening that critic Andrew Sarris famously wrote, “In my unhumble opinion, Lola Montès is the greatest film of all time, and I am willing to stake my critical reputation on this one proposition above all others.” In 1969, Sarris wrote, “Lola Montès is clearly the film of the year, or any year.”

“THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CINEMASCOPE MOVIE EVER MADE. Ophüls uses color with a dazzling, kaleidoscopic imagination.”
— Phillip Lopate

“SUPERB…THERE IS NOT A FLAW IN THE MISE EN SCÈNE, NOT A DULL FRAME FOR THE EYE.”
– Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic

“A BAROQUE MASTERPIECE.”
– Dave Kehr

“OPHÜLS' MASTERPIECE… majestic and complex... Nearly as reviving and moving as the response of Mozart to da Ponte's Cosi Fan Tutte.”
– Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker

For more information, links and showtimes, visit www.filmforum.org