By John Anderson
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, November 21, 2008

Place all of cinema's truly awful performers end to end, and they would stretch from here to the third moon of Pluto. (Pluto, by the way, is adorable, and a better actor than, say, Keanu Reeves.) Sometimes, however, badness is goodness. And without "bad" performances, the following three movies wouldn't have been as good as they are:

· "Cabaret": In her Oscar-winning performance as the talent-free Sally Bowles, Liza Minnelli was playing someone whom even Bowles's creator, Christopher Isherwood, described as "one of those individuals whom respectable society shuns in horror." Minnelli seems unaware of her over-the-top-itude, which really makes the movie.

· "Vertigo": Was Kim Novak an inept actress? Or was it her character who was the inept actress -- and nevertheless seduces Jimmy Stewart? And is Novak therefore a genius? Only Alfred Hitchcock knows . . .

· "Lola Montes": Ah, the best of the bad. Martine Carol was one of the most beautiful women in French film when she made Max Ophüls's 1955 masterpiece. Her casting wasn't quite the same as what Billy Wilder had done in "Sunset Boulevard" a few years earlier (casting a washed-up silent-film star to play a washed-up silent film star). But the shallowness of Carol's stardom and celebrity, and the candy-colored artifice of the cinema around her, all fed into Ophüls's process -- a process which, by the way, left its original audiences perplexed. Angry. And insulted, although they might not quite have been aware of that.

Max Ophüls was certainly insulted: "Lola Montes," the last film by the great German director, is one of the great "lost" films of cinema, ranking with "Greed," "The Magnificent Ambersons" and "Metropolis" as a victim of studio butchery. Despite the valiant efforts of restorers and archivists, these films will probably never be seen in exactly the way their directors intended.

Still, the reissued "Lola Montes" that opens today is as close as a restoration can come to recapturing the truth.

"Until now," said Bruce Goldstein of Rialto Pictures, the film's distributor, " 'Lola' has only been available in the most washed-out, dreary copies imaginable. Which was kind of like watching 'Lawrence of Arabia' on your cellphone."

Goldstein added that the restoration executed by the Cinémathèque Française reemphasizes the spectacular color design that was such a major part of Ophüls's conception -- "what we call in the business 'eye-popping.' This one really is."

The restoration also returns about four minutes of footage, missing since audiences first walked out on "Lola."

Known for his always-agile camera and the lavish choreography of his shots, Ophüls ("Letter From an Unknown Woman," "The Earrings of Madame de . . . ") created an ornate, opulent and ostentatious film about an ornate, opulent and ostentatious woman. Our instincts make us want to see Lola as a heroine, and Carol as giving a heroic performance. Ophüls tricks us into playing a trick on ourselves.

As the story opens, so does the Mammoth Circus, conducted by the whip-cracking Ringmaster played by Peter Ustinov (who can never quite crack that whip, a running gag of considerable Freudian significance). He introduces the infamous Lola, who arrives on a throne, amid jugglers and clowns. The audience is invited to ask Lola questions, which they yell out: Whom does she love best? Why did she never stay with her lovers? Where are her children? Is she wearing a bra?

Remember, this is 1955, long before the appearance of People magazine.

In choosing her as his quasi-heroine, Ophüls was being prescient about the qualities of modern celebrity. Lola is famous for her sex life, for salacious rumors, but mostly for being famous. In choosing Carol as his lead actress, Ophüls was being coy: Carol had once thrown herself into the Seine over a love affair and was rescued by the taxi driver who had just dropped her off. The romance of such a reckless gesture, and the pathos of being fished out of the drink by a cabbie, must have made Carol irresistible to a director making a movie that so profoundly reflected itself -- and which is so campy about it.

There's nothing campier than the film's first flashback, which finds Lola and Liszt (Will Quadflieg) in a luxurious carriage, riding through the Italian countryside, visibly bored with each other. They share a farewell kiss that's uncomfortably stiff, and you realize what Ophüls is up to: life as tableau vivant, his supposedly real-life characters cast in poses and situations that are as deliberate and theatrical as anything in a circus.

Back in the center ring, in fact, Ustinov is announcing that 12 "tableaux vivants" will be staged about Lola's life, and Ophüls again takes us away from the circus, his 360-degree camera sweeps around the crowd, and we're off to the life of Lola.

Lola steals her mother's lover and avoids the arranged marriage Mom had planned for her, to a much older man. She eventually beds Liszt and Ludwig. Back at the circus, the Ringmaster talks about Lola's dreams of dancing, and Carol executes a series of simple steps -- it is all spectacle at half-speed, a lot of pseudopomp and scenery but short on almost every element of genuine drama and, like Carol, devoid of authority. She, like Lola and the circus, are like palimpsests of something we once saw, once imagined, but which are only being suggested here, not delivered.

Carol is too old to play the young Lola, too graceless to play a dancer, utterly devoid of convincing emotion, and so the obvious question is: Why watch "Lola Montes"? One reason, ironically, is the spectacle: Ophüls makes a beautiful film; the color is intoxicating, the camera moves with exactly the fluid brilliance Lola lacks, and Ophüls's mastery of his medium is unequaled. But here's what's more important: Art makes us view the world differently. Great art makes us look at the world differently, permanently. Watch "Lola Montes," and you may never watch a movie the same way again.

Lola Montes (115 minutes, at Landmark's E Street Cinema) is not rated. It contains adult content.