MOULIN ROUGE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 760, 12 February 1954, Page 18

MOULIN ROUGE

(Romulus) F John Huston’s Moulin Rouge maintained anything like the quality of its: best parts it would be a very good film. It is (alas!) a very disappointing one. The story, from a book by Pierre La Mure, written around the life of the French painter Toulouse-Lautrec, is mainly about the artist’s visits to the Moulin Rouge and the paintings they inspired, his addiction to alcohol, and two unhappy love affairs. A flashback shows the childhood accident which stopped the growth of Lautrec’s legs so that he became a dwarf. The opening of the film is fast and stylish-quite dazzling, in fact, in its recreation of a night at the Moulin Rouge in 1890. This is high-class Huston, with imaginative use of the camera that recalls The Red Badge of Courage. Lautrec (Jose Ferrer) appears as a sketching hand and a wineglass, and at the end of the night stands, alone for the first time, by his table before going out into the night. His lonely departure and the walk home contrast effectively with the violence of the opening sequences. The flashback to childhood is introduced, and Lautrec meets the street girl (Colette Marchand) of the first love affair. The whole of this affair is reasonably fluid cinema, but the film seems to fall apart after Lautrec returns to his painting and throws open the windows of his self-chosen gas chamber to the sunlight of Paris. Of course, it couldn’t have ended on that false note-not that it aims to be specially truthful as a record of Lautrec’s life, as far as I can gather -but the rest of the story is told in a disjointed and at stimes even tedious fashion; and en ending that looks like making effective use of superimposed shots from the Moulin Rouge sequences is ruined by sugary farewells from the exasperating Miss Zsa Zsa Gabor. I can bear to think of her in Moulin Rouge only because she sings the haunting little Georges Auric melody by which the film will no doubt be remembered by many who never see it-and even that would have been put across better by someone else, Jose Ferrer‘s Lautrec has been criticised for its coldness, but this, after aH, wouldn’t be surprising as a protective mask in a man afflicted as he was. He has. on the other hand, fits of anger, passion and ‘ealousy which I found completely in character; and there is all the anguish in the world in his strained carriage as he moves through the dark streets, up a stairway or about his room. Colette Marchand’s playing of the girl must also be mentioned-it ranges easily all the way from the gutter to moments of sensuous enchantment. —