Monthly Archives: April 2016

  • Lust for Life

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vincente Minnelli (1956)

    Kirk Douglas is extraordinarily good at bringing out the less obvious sides to apparently regular guys (The Glass Menagerie, A Letter to Three Wives, Detective Story).  He can play heroes too (Spartacus). Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life is one of his most famous roles yet, for all his talent and effort, Douglas is wrong in it:  sad to say, you’re increasingly aware of the effort rather than the talent.   At the start of the film – adapted from a best-selling ‘novelised’ biography by Irving Stone – Vincent, who’s been studying for the priesthood, is refused a licence by the church authorities.  We’re told that he’s quite unable to speak extempore, that he writes and reads out screeds of sermons which bore his listeners.  Because he’s so desperate to spread the word of God, one of the church elders gets Vincent a posting in a poor mining area in the Borinage region of Belgium.  We briefly see him preaching.  Kirk Douglas is so charismatic you can’t believe he wouldn’t have any congregation in thrall.   It’s hard not to like and admire this famously energetic actor’s desire to get inside the head of a super-sensitive artist; there are moments when the star’s appetite for the role and his physicality connect with Vincent’s ‘lust for life’.  But Douglas is too aware of the importance of what he’s doing.  Although he brings lashings of intensity to his portrait of a tormented genius, he doesn’t bring much depth – or, in Vincent’s frequent, impassioned rants, any variety.  (It could be argued that, if you see van Gogh as a monomaniac obsessive, this is justifiable but I’m not convinced.)  When Vincent is in an insane asylum and suffering from, among other things, ‘profound inertia’, it’s a relief.  Douglas is more eloquent on the rare occasions when he’s quiet.

    Vincente Minnelli is as conscientious as his leading man; the same probably goes for the screenwriter Norman Corwin, although the dialogue is mostly clumsy – making points rather than revealing character.  Both the opening and closing credits include long lists of thanks, to galleries, museums and private art collectors.  Minnelli and the producer John Houseman clearly meant this biopic to be a serious tribute to the life in question.  Originals of the art were photographed in the collections that owned them, then converted to Cinemascope images.   Minnelli’s visual flair (especially for colour) enables him, with the help of his cinematographer Russell Harlan, to make effective bridges between his moving pictures and van Gogh’s art.  While it might seem an insult to the paintings to present them with Miklós Rózsa’s hyperbolic, insatiable music on the soundtrack, the art transcends the score so easily that it makes it tolerable – an accompaniment.  On the whole, though, the Rózsa music is a disaster:  you want to beg it to stop.  When van Gogh, in his last days, is driven crazy by the sound of a brass band and a crowd of people enjoying themselves and clamps his hands to his head and his remaining ear, you feel more sympathy with him than at almost any other point of the movie.  You feel the same kind of sympathy with Gauguin when, exasperated by Vincent’s implacable passion, he tells him to shut up.

    Lust for Life invites this cheap sarcasm because its serious, well-intentioned but monotonous approach becomes tiresome.  Early on, you feel that Minnelli is onto something – that the visual and aural overload may be able to express  van Gogh’s heightened apprehension of the world around him.  But the sensory excess is relentless and unvarying; and there’s no kind of relationship between it and the character of Vincent – Kirk Douglas’s insistent playing makes him another of the exaggerated effects.  (The BFI, in their quest for the best available print, screened one with Spanish subtitles – which added another, bizarre layer to the hyperactivity on screen and soundtrack.)   Anthony Quinn as Gauguin and James Donald as Vincent’s brother Theo are the only actors who are able to get some freedom from the scheme of the film, and to develop some kind of performing rhythm.  (Perhaps Noel Purcell, in his one scene as a commercially successful artist relation of the van Goghs, manages this too although the scene is crudely structured and written).  Quinn, although he hardly deserved his Best Supporting Actor Oscar, has the confidence to individualise Gauguin – he’s isn’t weighed down by the responsibility of playing a famous person.  He has a louche authority and is funny when he’s being casual; when he emotes, however, he’s even more tedious than Vincent.  James Donald gives an intelligent, emotionally well-judged performance as the lean, melancholic Theo.  It’s one of the most effective things in Lust for Life that the extracts from Vincent’s letters are read in voiceover by Theo.  Donald doesn’t try to impose himself on the words – he lets them speak for themselves and also manages to express some of Theo’s love for his brother.

    The acting in the smaller parts is mostly terrible, partly because Minnelli seems to have no ear for English accents.  The impoverished miners of the Borinage are as posh as the starchy, unfeeling church commissioners.  Pamela Brown is striking but sounds too educated as a working woman whom Vincent lives with for a time.  The voices of other British actors – like Henry Daniell (as van Gogh senior) and Jeanette Sterke (as Vincent’s cousin Kay) – are colourlessly mid-Atlantic.   Apart from Quinn, the Americans – including Everett Sloane as the doctor who treats Vincent towards the end of his life – are constrained.  Still, that’s preferable to the abominable theatricality of Lionel Jeffries as another doctor; and Jill Bennett, although she has some presence as Vincent’s sister, is stagy in her movements.  The actors playing other famous artists – Bernard, Pissarro, Seurat and so on – are a comedy troupe.  You’re very conscious watching Lust for Life of how trapped in the Hollywood conventions of the period the whole thing is.   The cast mostly speak their lines as if paralysed by the importance of the subject matter and the major-motion-picture trappings of the production.   At the same time, van Gogh is the dominant figure in it and his tragedy is so personal that his personality seems alien to the enterprise.  (Even so, I would have liked to see Montgomery Clift in this role:  he wouldn’t have had the natural physical colouring but he would have had the right temperament.)  This really is a subject that you feel could have been brought to the screen much more successfully at a later date.  Perhaps it is in Robert Altman’s Vincent and Theo, which I haven’t seen.

    18 May 2012

  • Lover Come Back

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Delbert Mann (1961)

    Carol Templeton is a rising star in the world of advertising.  Doris Day, who plays Carol, is a misfit in the Madison Avenue of the early 1960s – and not just because she’s a high-flying female.   Carol’s incongruousness in New York is intentional – and meant to be comical: she’s from Nebraska – but Doris Day comes from another world in terms of personality.  Radiating hygienic rectitude, she’s like a bossy school teacher among the louche male executives.  Delbert Mann’s direction and the script by Paul Henning and Stanley Shapiro seem to want to make Carol ridiculous but they succeed only superficially.  She wears a sequence of hats that look silly and stick out like sore thumbs on the crowded New York street.  She often looks overdressed below the neck too but this is partly because Carol is conspicuous as the only woman on screen who’s not either a floosie dancer or a mere secretary.  She also keeps being outwitted by her professional nemesis Jerry Webster (Rock Hudson), whose creativity is limited but who’s a world-class schmooze-artist.  Since Carol doesn’t claim to be sophisticated, it seems unkind to poke fun at her gullibility – but the film-makers’ attempts to do so don’t really work anyway because of Doris Day:  she’s so electrifyingly competent that she’s invulnerable.  When Carol trips on something left lying on the floor of an apartment, Day’s false steps look almost choreographed – the trip emphasises her physical comedy skills and indeed her balance.  When she kicks off her shoes casually, the effect is one of fine precision.  The downside of Doris Day’s dazzling briskness, on this occasion, is that it detracts from the romantic comedy that Lover Come Back is meant to be.

    The plot is all about deception.  Jerry Webster pretends to be Dr Linus Tyler, a chemist whom Jerry’s hired to concoct a product which doesn’t exist but which, for reasons not worth explaining (the satire of advertising mores is very obvious), Jerry and his company president (Tony Randall) need to exist.   I was drowsing shortly before the first scene in which Rock Hudson passes himself off as the unworldly inventor and I wondered if Carol too was dissimulating but she wasn’t:  it was just the artificiality in Doris Day’s playing.  Carol falls for Dr Tyler:  when he turns out to be a man she’s never met but whom she knows she loathes she switches neatly from infatuation to hopping- mad censure and is sufficiently self-possessed to exact immediate, humiliating revenge on Jerry.  She’s self-possessed in spite of having drunk a glass of champagne and the fact that you’ve been led to believe that one drop of alcohol will be enough to make her helpless.  Forgetting this frailty at a crucial moment for the sake of plot convenience is a cheat – especially when the real Dr Tyler’s invention then turns out to be an intoxicating candy which does disable Carol:  she sleeps with Jerry and wakes up to find herself married to him.

    In a rushed finale, she gets the marriage annulled but, after giving birth to a baby who’s the fruit of their one-night stand, Carol decides she wants to marry Jerry again.   This upbeat ending has the opposite effect:  there’s been nothing to suggest that Carol and Jerry (as opposed to Carol and Linus Tyler) could live happily ever after so their remarriage seems a hellish prospect, and leaves you with a feeling more unpleasant than anti-climax.  Lover Come Back fails to deliver as rom-com – on the premise that opposites attract and true love eventually overcomes all tensions between them.  It delivers only on its own determination to show Carol Templeton as having learned her lesson for trying to succeed in a man’s world, by becoming the wife and mother that a woman is meant to be.  The same thing happens in Pillow Talk (also co-written by Stanley Shapiro) – the Doris Day character is a career-girl interior decorator destined to be a homemaker – but there’s a difference in the chemistry between her and Rock Hudson in the earlier movie.  In Lover Come Back, Day simply switches her feelings on and off, according to what’s needed at a particular point of the story.

    Rock Hudson is amusing and pleasantly relaxed.  He’s playing a man who’s pretending to be a man who (as the nerdy scientist) isn’t cut out for marriage:  Hudson’s own life – as so often when you see his films at this distance in time – gives the film an unintended edge.  But his inherent gentleness makes some of the broad comic routines that Hudson is asked to go through more appealing than they would be with a more vivid, dynamic performer.  His good looks lend Linus Tyler’s tentativeness and modesty a peculiar charge.  Tony Randall, as Jerry’s boss, is funny, combining a dapper exterior with scarcely suppressed hysteria in his voice.   With Jack Kruschen as the real Dr Tyler, Edie Adams as a chorus girl, and Jack Albertson.  The songs have the feel of trying, and failing, to replicate the perky energy of earlier Doris Day-movie title songs.   The incidental music by Frank DeVol needlessly underlines the characters’ emotions and reactions.

    19 July 2013

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