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