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The Making of Max Ophuls' Lola Montès/Lola Montez

Film history is full of masterpieces financed by rubber checks," as François Truffaut once said: "Sounder financing and less adventurous financiers do not necessarily make for better pictures. They only make for more reasonable pictures" (Ophuls, "Confidentially Ours" 23).1 "Loh Montés premiered at one hundred forty minutes, but was cut (against the director's wishes) to one hundred ten minutes for distribution."2 Even in 2003 you could read this misinformation on websites. The one hundred forty minutes are still in many books. But this dualistic vision of brave filmmakers and butcher-like producers, victims and perpetrators, is much too simple (not only) in the case of Lola. The first versions of the French and the German Lola were not cut against the director's wishes. But the second versions were butchered behind his back into third versions. The length of the newly restored version corresponds to the one hundred sixteen minutes of the German premiere version. The strange one-hundred-forty-minute rumor started in 1958 when Richard Roud published Max Ophuls: An Index. Since then, the rumor of this never-verified length was repeated for nearly fifty years. The more Lola was cut, the greater the chaos of prints and reedited versions, the more people would exaggerate the original length. To complete the confusion: Lola, never had one original: it started with three and it ended with none. Nothing was reasonable, normal or moderate around and about Lola. In 1955 it was the most expensive picture made in Europe after World War II. With a budget of more than eight million D-Marks—which