by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Lust for Life, one of those classics that’s been in my range of vision for some time
(TCM has shown it fairly often) but I’d never got around actually to seeing
until now. It began as an historical novel by Irving Stone about the legendary
painter Vincent Van Gogh, who’s become one of the superstar artists even though
during his lifetime he only sold one painting; today the few works of his that
enter the private market (most are in musea, some of which are credited in this
film for allowing their Van Goghs to be photographed for it) sell for eight- or
nine-figure sums and the musea lucky enough to have substantial Van Gogh
holdings — including the largest one of all, appropriately enough in the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in Van Gogh’s ancestral homeland, the Netherlands —
organize touring exhibitions of them and make tons of money showing them. I’d
never seen this film before, nor have I seen Robert Altman’s Van Gogh biopic, Dear
Theo, and seen today Lust for
Life is a movie that overwhelms with the
sheer relentless power of Van Gogh’s art and Kirk Douglas’s portrayal of him. Lust
for Life was directed by Vincente Minnelli,
for whom this film was a personal project he deeply wanted to do — though he
had a squabble with MGM over it and, much to his disgust, they forced him first
to film the hit musical Kismet.
As he explained to interviewers Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in The
Celluloid Muse, “I had to finish [Kismet] in a hurry and get on a plane and go to Europe and
start Lust for Life: they were
keeping a field of sunflowers alive for me artificially in the south of France
until I got there!”
Lust for Life
was pretty obviously influenced by John Huston’s marvelous biopic of
Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge,
made four years earlier (1952) and noted for the determination of its director
and cinematographer (Oswald Morris) not only to make a movie about a famous
artist but to reproduce, as much as possible, the visual style of the artist
they were depicting in the movie’s images, framing and (especially) color
design. Minnelli and his
cinematographers, Russell Harlan and Freddie Young, managed not only to shoot
in some of the same locations where Van Gogh had actually lived and painted,
but to a quite remarkable extent to capture the look of Van Gogh’s art in the
film: the dramatically etched images, the off-kilter framing, the blazing (and
sometimes surprisingly subdued) colors — usually Van Gogh went to town
color-wise on his landscapes but muted his palette considerably when depicting
people, which may itself be a comment on his mental state and his troubled
relations with the rest of the human race — to the point where even on the
(blessedly few) occasions the film stops to give us what amounts to a slide
show of Van Gogh’s paintings, the visual style remains strikingly the same.
Scripted by Norman Corwin (one of the most interesting and sensitive writers
from the golden age of radio drama) from Stone’s novel, Lust for Life often falls back on typical Hollywood cliché
(especially in the scripting of Van Gogh’s relationships — such as they were —
with women and some rather obvious cues in Miklós Rósza’s score), but the
Faustian energy of Minnelli’s direction, Corwin’s writing, Douglas’s acting and
the overall success in evoking the “look” of Van Gogh’s art all come together
for a quite remarkable movie.
There is one big weakness in the film, and that is the horrendously
miscast Anthony Quinn as Van Gogh’s friend and fellow artist, Paul Gauguin; it
seems totally unbelievable that the Academy Awards should have overlooked Kirk
Douglas’s monumental portrayal of Van Gogh (unlike his son Michael, Kirk
Douglas never won a competitive
Oscar) and given Quinn a supporting award for one of the schtickiest performances I’ve ever seen in my life (rivaling,
among misplaced and undeserving Oscar-winners, Luise Rainer’s in The
Great Ziegfeld and Al Pacino’s in Scent
of a Woman). Not only are we supposed to
believe the half-Irish, half-Mexican Quinn as a French painter (who, after Van
Gogh’s death, relocated to the South Seas), he’s playing Van Gogh’s sidekick
almost exactly the way he played Tyrone Power’s sidekick in the marvelous 1941
remake of Blood and Sand
(directed by Rouben Mamoulian, who started the trick imitated by Minnelli here
of spray-painting great swaths of nature to make them look more like the work
of a famous artist), only this particular Quinn schtick is much more believable when he’s playing a
bullfighter than when he’s playing an artist. I couldn’t help but wish for
George Sanders in the role; though he was a bit on the seedy side by 1956,
Sanders had already played a character based on Gauguin in the 1942 film The
Moon and Sixpence and his ice would have
been a much better counterpoint to Douglas’s fire.
As for Kirk Douglas, one
imdb.com reviewer on this film quoted his son Michael as saying “his father
isn’t considered a great actor because the style back then in the types of
roles he played has changed.” Like his friend and frequent co-star, Burt
Lancaster, Douglas made his initial reputation playing villains — he’s galvanic
in films like The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Out of the Past and Detective Story (he’s a cop in the last, but a morally corrupt and
underhanded one) — but soon got to be too big a star to be cast as anything but
a hero. Vincent Van Gogh as portrayed here isn’t really a villain, but he is a literally larger-than-life character, an emotional
sponge who sacrificed virtually everything — material success, friendship,
romance — for his art, and went through life blithely obsessed only with his own struggle, convinced that the world owed
him a living (though Corwin’s script also — with the complexity of life rather
than the neatness of fiction — shows Van Gogh as a workaholic with a profound
sense of guilt that he couldn’t
make a living from his painting even while he had no inclination, desire or
even ability to change his style to make his work more salable) and reminding
me a great deal about what jazz musician Jackie McLean had to say about a
similarly obsessed, unreliable, irresponsible artistic genius (who also died
young), Charlie Parker: after detailing how often Parker hit up his friends for
money, drugs, instruments (he was often hocking his for drug money and would
need to borrow a saxophone to work) and whatever, McLean said, “Which of us
could afford him? And I mean that the other way, too: which of us could afford
to pay him what we owed him?”
One odd thing about Lust for Life is how homoerotic it is; though it doesn’t depict
Van Gogh as outright Gay (and the biographical evidence doesn’t suggest he
was), the film really revolves around the two closest relationships of his
life, both with men and the sort of things that would be called “bromances”
today. One was with his actual brother Theo (James Donald, giving the sort of marvelously
understated performance we often get from British actors; if anyone in the
supporting cast deserved an Oscar, it was he, not Quinn! — and intriguingly, when the soundtrack
gives us the “Dear Theo” letters that are the primary source for Van Gogh’s
life, we hear Donald’s voice, not Douglas’s, reading them), on whom he relied
for financial support as well as what little promotion his art got to potential
buyers. The other is with Gauguin, and the depiction of their time together in
Arles shows them as a bitchy Gay couple with virtually diametrically opposed
views on how to paint and how to live — Van Gogh still dreams of a committed
relationship with a woman whole Gauguin’s attitude towards women is about
picking pretty and dumb ones and exploiting them sexually, more like the
stereotype of a Gay man than any way straight men are expected to behave — who
get increasingly on each other’s nerves until they finally part. Van Gogh’s
biographers insist that the infamous incident in which the painter cut off part
of his ear was over a breakup with a prostitute he’d been dating
(non-professionally — such a relationship is depicted in the film, but considerably earlier), but
in Corwin’s script it’s the final quarrel with Gauguin that precipitates it.
(In Michael Douglas’s TCM interview, he recalls seeing an early screening of Lust
for Life and freaking out over this scene,
even though in the tactful way of a Code-era movie we’re spared any shots of
bloodletting or gore; Kirk Douglas had to show his son both sides of his face
to assure him that, whatever he’d seen on screen, in real life both his ears
were still on his face where nature put them.)
Lust for Life may be compromised in some of the details — like the
careful “planting” of hints about suicide in the early scenes (when Van Gogh as
a would-be minister lectures his working-poor parishioners that suicide is a
sin, Norman Corwin obviously
means us to see that as ironic coming from one of the most famous suicides of
all time) — but at base it’s a galvanic movie, filled with the energy and
passion of its subject, a worthy portrayal of the thin line between genius and
insanity, told with the grimness and exaltation its story deserves and
convincing us not only that Kirk Douglas is Vincent Van Gogh, but that this individual could
have lived no other way: his peculiar combination of artistic genius and utter
lack of social skills — and his inability to compromise, which made him a great
artist and a terrible person —
set him up for precisely this fate. Another oddity of this movie, especially
for one made in the socially content 1950’s, is the interesting streak of
social comment in it; when Van Gogh, as an aspiring minister, gets sent to the
poorest part of the Netherlands to preach to the coal miners and finds that nothing in the establishment Christianity he was taught to
teach has anything to offer people living on the edge, he starts going down
into the mines and ends up living in a hovel, which makes it seem like he’s
going to become a self-consciously social artist doing paintings as political
commentary (like Millet, whom in the course of their arguments Van Gogh
idolizes and Gauguin excoriates) until his arrival in France in the middle of
the Impressionist revolution turns his art into a very different direction.
Charles told me he’s seen Van
Gogh’s paintings in the Rijksmuseum and nothing you’ve seen of them in
reproductions prepares you for the real thing — especially the almost
three-dimensional effect created by his famous impasto style, the thicknesses of paint he applied to his
canvases (and though Kirk Douglas looks relatively convincing in the scenes in
which he’s actually shown painting, he’s not seen applying paint directly from the tube without a
brush, one of the real Van Gogh’s trademarks) — and he seemed as impressed by the movie as I was!
