The American master John Huston was an Oscar winning director and screenwriter, and no slouch as an actor. A bon vivant, boxer, horseman and at his richest, a member of the Irish landed gentry, he became Hollywood’s most famous Renaissance Man.
But the one thing he studied, academically in Paris and not from watching his father and learning to act on-the-job appearing in plays with the old man, was painting. You can see that painterly eye in just a few of his films — “Fat City,” “The Dead,” “The Red Badge of Courage” and most famously “Moulin Rouge.” Most of his movies are best remembered for the casting, clever plotting and classic performances.
In “Moulin Rouge,” the French-trained painter turned playwright, writer, director and actor and his art director (Paul Sheriff) and production designer/set-director Marcel Vertès turned Technicolor loose on a tale of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the brilliant painter and illustrator who documented Belle Époque Paris — its lurid street life and gaudy night life, most famously in posters and paintings of the notorious nightclub and its habitues.
“Moulin Rouge” (1952) is an adaptation of a fictionalized biography of Toulouse-Lautrec, a picture both hopelessly conventional in the ways of 1940s and ’50s bio-pics, and garishly and gloriously “painted” in strokes and colors the disabled, diminutive painter worked in.
The emphasis is on the melodramatic arc of the Toulouse-Lautrec’s life — a child of privilege and nobility injured in a fall which, coupled with the fact that his “noble” parents were first cousins, left him with barely functional legs, stunted in their growth due to bone breaks that never “knitted.”
That marked him for life and in the script’s telling, left him a loner, an artist moved by the lives spinning around him, but bitter that the women who made time for him were almost certainly “using” him.
“Oh, Henri why can’t you be tall and handsome?”
One or two more drinks, Henri cracks, and “I will be.”
Jose Ferrer’s Oscar-nominated performance as Toulouse-Lautrec (and as Henri’s disapproving father) is mostly remembered for the little man stunt of it all — trick shots, walking in ditches, seen standing on his knees with his feet strapped behind his thighs. But nobody of his era managed oversized performances quite like Ferrer. His “Cyrano,” the towering defense attorney turn in “The Caine Mutiny,” the man’s florid baritone and steely gaze made him perfect for “larger-than-life.”
“Marriage is like a dull meal with the dessert at the beginning,” the sad but witty loner insists. “I have it on the very highest authority.
Colette Marchand plays the street-walker Marie, a woman who turns gratitude for his gallant “rescue” of her from the police into something resembling love. But muse or not, she’s almost certain to be faithless and sure to use him and leave him even more broken.
Suzanne Flon portrays a Myriamme, a more soulful and warm flirtation, but one treated by him with the same bitter cynicism that she’ll choose another, first chance she gets.
Huston treats us to the spectacle of Zsa Zsa Gabor as a beautiful, vain blonde chanteuse, a star of the Moulin Rouge (Red Windmill) club. Her character, Jane Avril, was famous for her Can Can. Here, she’s a singer, with her singing voice dubbed by dancer/actress Muriel Smith, whom Huston and Co. cast (along with an unnamed Black male dancer) to remind viewers that Paris nightlife was more integrated than it was in 1950s America.
The scenes in the club are the life of this movie, with Toulouse-Latrec at his customary table, effortlessly sketching the whirl of legs, petticoats and dancer’s bottoms, with various strata of Paris society ogling, whistling and caught up in the gay maelstrom kicking, splitting and spinning around the dance floor.
The first third of “Moulin Rouge” plunges us into this milieu, showing us faintly caricature-worthy faces (Tutte Lemkow, wearing prosthetics that make him almost grotesque) that the painter immortalized, introducing amazing dancers (Katherine Kath and Muriel Smith) and their petty, venal (and racist) rivalry.
The flashbacks to the artist’s childhood and domestic scenes of him drinking and bickering with Marie dominate the middle acts, overwhelming a brief encounter with his painting contemporaries (Christopher Lee plays the pointillist Georges Seurat) and the late-life breakthrough for the artist is lost in the lonely “dissipation” that is the film’s dominant theme.
“I drink. A little more each day. Thus, I forget my loneliness and my ugliness and the pain in my legs.”
Every scene in the club crackles with bawdy, PG-13 life, and the best hope for most of those scenes not set in the colorful chaos of what became — thanks to Henri’s posters (the movie insists) — the hottest club in Paris is that they be witty. About half of them rise to this challenge.
“The wise woman patterns her life on the theory and practice of modern banking. She never gives her love, but only lends it on the best security, and at the highest rate of interest.”
At some point, the generic melodrama of an alcoholic artist drinking himself to death fails to move, even if we sympathize with his plight, even if Ferrer gives us a glimpse of the despair and simple disappointment of being born rich and titled, finally earning fame on your own merits and not getting any satisfaction — romantic or otherwise — out of it.
But Huston and his production crew still managed to create a film of saturated colors that pops off the screen, with any given scene in the club worthy of a still frame all its own, suitable for hanging in a museum or in any chic home.
Rating: PG, prostitution, alcohol abuse
Cast: Jose Ferrer, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Colette Marchand, Suzanne Flon, Peter Cushing,
Claude Nollier, Muriel Smith, Tutte Lemkow and Katherine Kath.
Credits: Directed by John Huston, scripted by Anthony Veiller and John Huston, based on the book by Pierre La Mure. An MGM release on Tubi, other streamers
Running time: 1:57
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