Even before Andrew Sarris fanned the flames of auteur-theory wars by proclaiming it to be the greatest film of all time, Lola Montes had always been an object of controversy. Extravagantly over-budgeted, heavily edited after hostile French screenings, and released in three different languages, it was from the start designed as an all-or-nothing gamble, an attempt to use its novelettish subject as a codex for everything its maker, Max Ophüls, stood for. As such, the filmmaker's obsessive concerns with the passage of time and female beauty (and its exploitation) take center stage—literally in this case, as the story unfurls largely in the three-ring arena of a 19th-century circus. The main attraction at the center of the swarming trapeze artists and costumed dwarves is the eponymous heroine (Martine Carol), an aging courtesan whose sole claim of fame, a list of illustrious lovers during her youthful romps throughout Europe, fills the big top with curious, salacious masses.  Fernando F. Croce