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Lola Montes [VHS]

Lola Montes [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Martine Carol , Peter Ustinov , Anton Walbrook , Henri Guisol , Lise Delamare
Director: Max Ophüls
Max Ophüls explores the scandalous life of dancer and courtesan Lola Montes with a bittersweet empathy that turns melodrama into a tragic melancholy masterpiece. Using the theatrical re-creation of Lola's life in a big-top pageant as a framing device, Ophüls contrasts the outrageous sensationalism of her reputation with poignant, poetic flashbacks that explore her many affairs, most notably with Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg) and King Ludwig of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook). Lola's greatest tragedy is that she loved well, if not too wisely. If Martine Carol's central performance is lacking passion, as many critics have argued, her quiet, at times seemingly passive demeanor makes her a veritable prisoner of her society and her reputation. Swept along by Ophüls's sweeping camerawork, which glides through the film in a balance of intimacy and contemplative remove as if on the wings of angels, her life becomes like a cinematic ballet with Ophüls the choreographer and conductor. Peter Ustinov costars as the jaded circus ringmaster, who nightly narrates her exploits to a throng of scandal-hungry spectators, while she performs with a face hardened in indifference, resigned to her empty role ...
List Price: $9.98 Our Price: $12.00
Liebelei [VHS]

Liebelei [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Paul Hörbiger , Magda Schneider , Luise Ullrich , Gustaf Gründgens , Olga Tschechowa
Director: Max Ophüls
This early Max Ophüls melodrama became his first big success. A young philandering army officer, trapped in a loveless affair with the wife of a strutting baron, falls in love with a shy young seamstress but cannot escape repercussions of his past. As the giddy lovers frolic through an idyllic romance (a lovely sleigh ride through the snow-covered forest becomes a swooning expression of their emotional innocence), the suspicious baron demands honor be served. Based on a play by Arthur Schnitzler (whose Reigen Ophüls later adapted for La Ronde), Liebelei contrasts the obsession with appearances and social decorum of high society with the rash sincerity and energy of youth in a style more visual than verbal. The restless camera of Ophüls's later work is only hinted at here, but the handsome photography and lush décor create a constrictive world where tradition rules. The opening opera house scene is especially striking, where character and class become defined simultaneously, and the haunting climax is so effective that Ophüls revived and refined it for The Earrings of Madame de.... The 1933 production was subsequently suppressed by the Nazis for its ...
List Price: $24.95
Laughing Heirs [VHS]

Laughing Heirs [VHS]

Staring: Lien Deyers , Heinz Rühmann , Ida Wüst , Max Adalbert , Lizzi Waldmüller
Director: Max Ophüls

Caught (1949) [VHS]

Caught (1949) [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: James Mason , Barbara Bel Geddes , Robert Ryan , Frank Ferguson , Curt Bois
Director: Max Ophüls
Max Ophüls's dark "Cinderella" melodrama belongs as much to the murky world of film noir as to the polished European dramas of high-society power games. Barbara Bel Geddes is a carhop who puts her hopes in a charm-school education and a modeling gig. When cold, demanding industrialist millionaire Robert Ryan suddenly proposes, her fashion magazine fantasies come true, but her loveless marriage makes her new mansion home a lonely gilded cage where she's more servant than wife. She runs off and becomes a white-collar receptionist (in furs and Saks gowns). James Mason, an idealistic doctor, hires her and slowly wins her heart, but her monstrous husband responds with a campaign of blackmail and psychological torments. Ophüls fights a script that all too often puts its themes into the mouth of Mason, whose constant harangues against the pursuit of money for money's sake sound increasingly like a broken record, but the director's delicate style beautifully captures both the surface elegance and emptiness of the millionaire lifestyle. Bel Geddes undergoes the transformation from a callow, naïve kid to a woman of strength and moral fortitude, while Mason tempers his saintliness with mom...
List Price: $9.98 Our Price: $18.95
Letter From an Unknown Woman [VHS]

Letter From an Unknown Woman [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Joan Fontaine , Louis Jourdan , Mady Christians , Marcel Journet , Art Smith
Director: Max Ophüls
"By the time you read this letter, I may be dead," reads aging bon vivant Louis Jourdan from a letter found in his tiny hotel room. With tousled hair and a tux tired from yet another night of meaningless flirtation, he's startled by these opening lines and suspends his preparations to flee a duel in order to read the history of a love affair that he can't remember. For the rest of the film we're transported to the life of Joan Fontaine's awkward young Viennese woman, who has been hopelessly enthralled by the dashing pianist ever since adolescence. For a moment she was his lover, the emotional pinnacle of her life but for the philandering rogue simply another fling in a blur of women passing through his bedroom. This was Max Ophüls's first personal project in Hollywood, and he injects this exquisitely stylish romantic melodrama (based on a novel by Stefan Zweig) with his continental sensibility. Both lush and restrained, the endlessly moving camera tracks, cranes, and circles around the characters while maintaining a measured distance. Fontaine delivers one of the best performances of her career, vulnerable and yearning without lapsing into sentimentality--and ultimately showing a ...
List Price: $14.98 Our Price: $44.97
La Ronde [VHS]

La Ronde [VHS]

Staring: Anton Walbrook , Simone Signoret , Serge Reggiani , Simone Simon , Daniel Gélin
Director: Max Ophüls
Ophuls presents his amused view of the rituals of love and lovemaking in ten timeless sketches full of humor and tenderness. Set in half-lit, turn-of-the-century Viennese interiors, La Ronde is an elaborate satire on sexual behavior, a panoramic display of illicit love in old Vienna that comments on the futility of transitory relationships in which the deceivers are always deceived.
List Price: $29.95 Our Price: $17.00
La Signora Di Tutti [VHS]

La Signora Di Tutti [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Isa Miranda , Memo Benassi , Tatyana Pavlova , Friedrich Benfer , Franco Coop
Director: Max Ophüls

List Price: $29.95 Our Price: $39.95
Caught [VHS]

Caught [VHS]

Staring: James Mason , Barbara Bel Geddes , Robert Ryan , Frank Ferguson , Curt Bois
Director: Max Ophüls
Max Ophüls's dark "Cinderella" melodrama belongs as much to the murky world of film noir as to the polished European dramas of high-society power games. Barbara Bel Geddes is a carhop who puts her hopes in a charm-school education and a modeling gig. When cold, demanding industrialist millionaire Robert Ryan suddenly proposes, her fashion magazine fantasies come true, but her loveless marriage makes her new mansion home a lonely gilded cage where she's more servant than wife. She runs off and becomes a white-collar receptionist (in furs and Saks gowns). James Mason, an idealistic doctor, hires her and slowly wins her heart, but her monstrous husband responds with a campaign of blackmail and psychological torments. Ophüls fights a script that all too often puts its themes into the mouth of Mason, whose constant harangues against the pursuit of money for money's sake sound increasingly like a broken record, but the director's delicate style beautifully captures both the surface elegance and emptiness of the millionaire lifestyle. Bel Geddes undergoes the transformation from a callow, naïve kid to a woman of strength and moral fortitude, while Mason tempers his saintliness with mom...
De Mayerling a Sarajevo [VHS]

De Mayerling a Sarajevo [VHS]

Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Staring: Edwige Feuillère , John Lodge , Aimé Clariond , Jean Worms , Jean Debucourt
Director: Max Ophüls
Who but Max Ophüls would recast the shot that started World War I as a romantic tragedy? Archduke Franz Ferdinand (John Lodge), heir to the court of Austria, is a young man entering the 20th century with new ideas--democracy figuring chief among them--much to the consternation of the king, who constantly sends him to the empire's farthest reaches. While in Czechoslovakia he meets the beautiful, strong-willed Princess Sophie (Edwige Feuillère) and falls deeply in love. The match is rejected by the court, but their love prevails through diplomatic compromise, social snubbing, and royal insult (in classic Ophüls fashion, we learn of their fate through conversations in opera boxes and servants gossiping behind closed palace doors). They are deliriously happy, until one fateful day, when Franz is sent to Sarajevo on the eve of their Independence Day in 1914. This is a classic Ophüls romantic tragedy: true love colliding with affairs of state and the cruel diplomacy of courtly behavior and royal hierarchy. As the tensions and angry uprisings spreading through the Austrian Empire explode into the first shots of World War I, Ophüls leaves us with the tragic story of innocent young lov...
List Price: $29.95
Letter from an Unknown Woman [VHS]

Letter from an Unknown Woman [VHS]

Staring: Joan Fontaine , Louis Jourdan , Mady Christians , Marcel Journet , Art Smith
Director: Max Ophüls
"By the time you read this letter, I may be dead," reads aging bon vivant Louis Jourdan from a letter found in his tiny hotel room. With tousled hair and a tux tired from yet another night of meaningless flirtation, he's startled by these opening lines and suspends his preparations to flee a duel in order to read the history of a love affair that he can't remember. For the rest of the film we're transported to the life of Joan Fontaine's awkward young Viennese woman, who has been hopelessly enthralled by the dashing pianist ever since adolescence. For a moment she was his lover, the emotional pinnacle of her life but for the philandering rogue simply another fling in a blur of women passing through his bedroom. This was Max Ophüls's first personal project in Hollywood, and he injects this exquisitely stylish romantic melodrama (based on a novel by Stefan Zweig) with his continental sensibility. Both lush and restrained, the endlessly moving camera tracks, cranes, and circles around the characters while maintaining a measured distance. Fontaine delivers one of the best performances of her career, vulnerable and yearning without lapsing into sentimentality--and ultimately showing a ...