Metrograph

Perhaps Ophuls’s supreme cinematic spectacle, his first in widescreen and color, and his final film before his early death at age 54, which makes one yearn to see what else he might have yet been able to do. This Technicolor dazzler dramatizes with great panache and intelligence the life of the infamous nineteenth-century courtesan (Martine Carol), who has been reduced to working as a circus attraction for ringmaster Peter Ustinov, nightly reliving her famous affairs with Franz Liszt and Bavaria’s King Leopold I, which are realized in opulent, garish storybook flashbacks.

Distributor: Janus Films