Saturday Night Cinema: Lust for Life

Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema classic is one of Vincent Minnelli’s best pictures (behind Gigi and Meet Me in St. Louis), a visually stunning portrait of Van Gogh, brilliant if not overplayed a bit by Kirk Douglas (but not to the point of excess as say, Al Pacino). In all fairness, playing a failed artist (at the time of his death, Van Gogh had not sold one painting) — a life crippled by insecurity and self-doubt and plagued by any number of behavioral conditions — requires a bit of the melodramatic.

Vincent Minnelli uses the screen like a canvas and paints a gorgeous picture, literally.

In contrast to the normal Hollywood biopic of ‘The Great Artist’, in which Art forever takes second place to the Man, Minnelli here offers an account of the developing intensity of Van Gogh’s art. Throughout Lust for Life, Van Gogh, brilliantly portrayed by Kirk Douglas as a man forever on a knife-edge, struggles to explain himself to his family and to Anthony Quinn’s Gauguin. However, Minnelli, with the colours he chooses – which follow those of the paintings – and with his dramatic counterpointing of events in Van Gogh’s life with his canvases, undermines all explanations. Minnelli neither explains Van Gogh’s art in terms of his life or vice versa, but celebrates both. (From Irving Stone’s novel).

Screen: Color-Full Life of van Gogh; ‘Lust for Life’ Tells Story Through Tints Kirk Douglas Stars in Film at the Plaza
By BOSLEY CROWTHER
Published: September 18, 1956

CLEARLY, the most dramatic feature of the life of Vincent van Gogh was the difference between his painting, which was forceful and sunny and warm, and the character of his disposition, which was clouded by dark and maddening moods. This contrast of coloration in the product and person of the man is more vivid and tantalizing than anything that happened in his career, including the celebrated episode of his slicing off his own ear.

Thus, it is gratifying to see that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in the persons of producer John Houseman and a crew of superb technicians, has consciously made the flow of color and the interplay of compositions and hues the most forceful devices for conveying a motion picture comprehension of van Gogh.

In “Lust for Life,” the film biography which had its world première last night at the Plaza Theatre in a benefit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Student Fellowship fund, color dominates the dramatization—the color of indoor sets and outdoor scenes, the color of beautifully reproduced van Gogh paintings, even the colors of a man’s tempestuous moods. These pictorial color continuities, planned like a musical score, have more effect upon the senses than the playing of Kirk Douglas in the leading role.

That does not discredit the acting of Mr. Douglas or the quality of the script prepared by Norman Corwin from a novel by Irving Stone. Both the script and the performance of this picture have a striking integrity in putting forth the salient details and the surface aspects of the life of van Gogh.

The tortuous career of the artist is recounted faithfully, from his experiences as an evangelist in a Belgian mining district to his ultimate suicide. The brutal rebuff of his love is in it, the turmoil of his affair with a prostitute, the uncertainty of his life in Paris and the explosiveness of his residence in Arles with Gauguin. The incidents of the painter’s manifestations of insecurity and emotional torment are well arranged, and Mr. Douglas performs them with superior intensity, variety and yet restraint.

What is more, and especially fascinating, is the remarkable resemblance he bears to the famous self-portraits of the artist which are discreetly but prominently displayed.

As Gauguin, the friend but ultimate irritant to van Gogh, Anthony Quinn also gives a splendid concept of a disordered creative man, and James Donald is quiet and affecting as the sympathetic brother of van Gogh. A score or more other actors and actresses offer, in brief supporting roles, some notion of the many people that touched the life of the lonely man.

But the quality of the spiritual suffering of the sick and self-doubting van Gogh is difficult to bring to full expression in conventional histrionics or words—of which, incidentally, there are many, perhaps too many, in this film. And so Mr. Houseman and Vincente Minnelli, the director, have wisely relied upon color and the richness and character it gives to images to carry their tortured theme. The cold grayness of a mining district, the reds of a Paris cafe, the greens of a Provençal village or the golden yellows of a field of ripening grain—these are the stimuli that gives us a sensory knowledge of the surroundings that weigh upon van Gogh and reflect the contrasting umbers and purples of the sad and fated man.

Persons prominent in society and the arts attended the benefit première last night for “Lust for Life.” According to a spokesman for M-G-M, proceeds of the première, amounted to more than $5,000.

Among those present at the theatre were Mrs. Sheldon Whitehouse, chairman of the women’s committee for the benefit; Mr. Houseman, Roland L. Redmond, president of the museum; Theodore Rousseau, curator of paintings at the museum; James J. Rorimer, director of the museum; Lincoln Kirstein, Mr. and Mrs. Alastair Bradley Martin, Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot and Mr. and Mrs. Walter C. Baker.

The Cast
LUST FOR LIFE, screen play by Norman Corwin, based on the novel by Irving Stone; directed by Vincente Minnelli and produced by John Houseman for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Vincent van Gogh . . . . . Kirk Douglas
Paul Gauguin . . . . . Anthony Quinn
Theo van Gogh . . . . . James Donald
Christine . . . . . Pamela Brown
Dr. Gachet . . . . . Everett Sloane
Roulin . . . . . Niall MacGinnis
Anton Mauve . . . . . Koel Purcell
Theodorus van Gogh . . . . . Henry Daniell
Anna Cornelia van Gogh . . . . . Madge Kennedy
Willemien . . . . . Jill Bennett
Dr. Peyron . . . . . Lionel Jeffries
Dr. Bosman . . . . . Laurence Nalsmith
Colbert . . . . . Eric Pohlmann
Kay . . . . . Jeanette Sterke
Johanna . . . . . Toni Gerry
Rev. Stricker . . . . . Wilton Graff
Mrs. Stricker . . . . . Isobel Elson
Rev. Peters . . . . . David Home
Commissioner van den Berghe . . . . . Noel Howlett
Commissioner de Smet . . . . . Ronald Adam
Ducrucq . . . . . John Ruddock
Rachel . . . . . Julie Robinson
Camille Pissarro . . . . . David Leonard
Emile Bernard . . . . . William Phipps
Seurat . . . . . David Bond
Pere Tanguy . . . . . Frank Perls
Waiter . . . . . Jay Adler
Adeline Ravoux . . . . . Laurence Badie