Moulin Rouge (Romulus Films, Moulin Productions, United Artists, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Moulin Rouge was another great film, directed by John Huston from a script he co-wrote with Anthony Veiller and based on a novel by Pierre La Mure. Though the plot of Moulin Rouge – unlike that of I Accuse! – is largely fictional, it’s a rich, powerful work both thematically and visually. The “look” of the film is stunning, carefully based on the art of the real Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and for that we have to thank John Huston and his cinematographer, Oswald Morris. The two of them battled throughout the shoot with Natalie Kalmus, the fabled “dragon lady” of Technicolor. Technicolor, not the first color process invented for films but the first one that was practical and didn’t require special projection equipment – a reel of film shot in Technicolor could be threaded into an ordinary projector just like a reel of black-and-white – was developed by a researcher named Dr. Herbert Kalmus and his wife Natalie. The original version, “two-strip Technicolor,” required a camera that loaded two strips of film, one to photograph red and one green. Then the images were combined in a lithographic process to make a full-color image. Two-strip had one major limitation – it could not photograph blue, though it could approach it (which is why in most two-strip films the sky is beige and objects one expects to be blue were turquoise or teal) – so Dr. Kalmus created “three-strip Technicolor” in the early 1930’s.

This relied on three strips of film instead of two, the third to photograph blue, and this in turn required a really big, clunky camera which the Technicolor company rented out to movie studios. Part of the deal required the studio to accept a “Technicolor consultant” as well as a second cameraman along with the studio’s own employee, and though Herbert and Natalie Kalmus had separated early on in the process’s history, Natalie Kalmus still worked for the company. She insisted that the colors be neon-bright throughout, and any director or cinematographer who wanted a subtler, more evocative use of color was going to have a fight on their hands. When Moulin Rouge was shot Technicolor was starting to face competition, notably by Eastmancolor, developed by Kodak, which didn’t need a special camera or three strips of film. Eastmancolor film could be loaded into an ordinary camera just like black-and-white film, and when developed would produce a serviceable, if not especially bright, color image. Huston and Morris fought with Natalie Kalmus throughout the making of Moulin Rouge, with the filmmakers demanding that the colors be softer and more subdued like those of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings. Fortunately, they won: the film remains a visual treat, expertly capturing the palette of the real-life Toulouse-Lautrec and starting a cycle of artists’ biopics (including Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life, about Vincent Van Gogh, in 1956) that likewise tried to evoke their subjects’ art in their visual “looks.”

Moulin Rouge is also charming, though a bit problematic, theatrically. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was part of a long-time family of French aristocrats who’d founded the city of Toulouse and named it after themselves. Henri was the only son of Count Alphonse de Toulouse-Lautrec (also José Ferrer) and his wife Adèle (Claude Nollier). At age 13 he broke both his legs in a household accident and the bones never healed properly, so he ended up only 4’ 8” and in a state of almost constant pain, which he tried to control by drinking (mostly) cognac. (There’s a nice scene in which the doctor treating him asks Alphonse and Adèle how they’re related, and when they say, “First cousins,” the doctor shrugs his shoulders sadly, as if to say the reason Henri’s legs aren’t healing properly is his parents are too damned inbred.) An imdb.com “Trivia” post details just what the 5’ 8” Ferrer had to do to transform into the 4’ 8” Toulouse-Lautrec: “José Ferrer was transformed into the short artist Toulouse-Lautrec by the use of camera angles, make-up, costume, concealed pits and platforms, and short body doubles. Ferrer also used a set of special knee pads of his own design which allowed him to walk on his knees with his lower legs strapped to his upper body. He suffered extreme pain and could only use them for short periods of time. The cane he used in most of his scenes was of absolute necessity. This fact was covered in a Life magazine story in 1952.” (When I first saw this film, I thought its most powerful scenes were the confrontations between Henri and his father, both played by Ferrer, though as dad he got to be his normal height.)

Getting tired of life in the countryside, Henri decides to go to Paris to study art. When he isn’t actually painting he hangs out at the Moulin Rouge, then just another French cabaret, a lot and offers the owner to make posters for them in exchange for free booze. Among the entertainers he meets at the Moulin Rouge are La Goulue (Katherine Kach), Jane Avril (Zsa Zsa Gabor – when I first saw Moulin Rouge I found her annoying, the only bad part of this otherwise truly engaging movie, but this time around she’s more tolerable, though it doesn’t help that she sings two songs – including one that’s called “It’s April Again” here but is better known as “Where Is Your Heart?” or the “Theme from Moulin Rouge” – wretchedly dubbed by fellow cast member Muriel Smith) and the Black dancer Du Chocolat (Rupert John). The fictional parts of the movie are the two women Toulouse-Lautrec more or less falls in love with despite his disability and the curdling self-hatred that comes along with it. The first is Marie Charlet (Colette Marchand, who got an “Introducing … “ credit but isn’t all that impressive), a prostitute whom Toulouse-Lautrec picks up on the street to save her from a police officer who’s harassing her. He pretends to the cop that she’s his date for the evening, they go back to his place, and the two of them end up in a very combative relationship that doesn’t seem to involve sex (the U.S. Production Code was still very much in force in 1952) but money and manipulation on her part and rank self-hatred on his. (In my years as a home-care aide I got to know quite a few people with disabilities, and Toulouse-Lautrec’s attitude towards his fellow humans matches what I’ve seen from all too many real disabled people, particularly the conviction that no one will love them for what they are because they won’t be able to see past the disability.)

His second lover is only slightly higher on the social scale: Myriamme Hayam (Suzanne Flon), whom he starts sort-of dating later in the film and who’s couth enough he can take her to horse races and operas but is still a gold-digger looking for a decently hunky rich man to marry him. She finds him in Marcel de la Voisière (Peter Cushing) and writes Toulouse-Lautrec a note saying that she really loves the artist but is willing to marry the other guy. Toulouse-Lautrec spends the rest of the movie obsessively pouring over that note and re-reading it while his life sinks surely into alcoholic dissipation and an early death – though there’s a charming scene at the end showing him on his deathbed as the personalities from the Moulin Rouge come in his dream to say goodbye to him. The 1952 Moulin Rouge is a great film – far better than the typically razzle-dazzle movie Baz Luhrmann made with the same title in 2001 (essentially a knock-off of Camille crowded with recent rock and rap songs in a film ostensibly set in the 1890’s) – and it was a huge hit at the box office, while the theme song became a hit in its own right. After Moulin Rouge so spectacularly succeeded, Natalie Kalmus not surprisingly changed her tune about it big-time; she took out ads in the Hollywood trade papers saying, essentially, “Other processes can give you color. Only Technicolor can give you Moulin Rouge color.”