LUST FOR LIFE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 940, 16 August 1957, Page 6

LUST FOR LIFE

(M.G.M.) Y Cert. HE facts of Vincent van Gogh’s life '" are so dramatic that his name must be known to many people who have no interest in his pictures. Even so, he is not really a popular subject, and the most sensational fact of all-sometimes referred to tactfully as his self-mutila-tion-is probably known to relatively few "filmgoers. For that reason anyone who set about making a film of his life ‘must have been tempted to make it popular by concentrating on its more interesting human aspects. Lust for Life doesn’t ignore them; btit the odd, surprising thing is that, taking its story and Gts title from Irving Stone’s popular novel of van Gogh’s life, it has done so well by his paintings. A man who had to dedicate himself to something, van Gogh failed in several careers before he became an artist for the last 10 years of his life. The film begins with his stay in the Borinage, a grim mining district in France; and this stark, uncompromising sequence is one of its best. Otherwise it is concerned mainly with his struggles as an artist,

his love affairs with his cousin and with the laundress Christine, his relations with his brother Theo and with Gauguin, and the bouts of insanity in his last years. The world van Gogh bequeathed to us is a world of startling colour in recreating which the director of this film, Vincente Minelli, has used colour as well as any American film-maker ever has. This is as true of the sombre interiors as of the warm tones of flesli, clay and cornfield; and the sequences which capture a period with flowing shots of the paintings and the landscapes they gave eternal life are extraordinarily _ effective. Undoubtedly the film is a thing of beauty. But a man’s work and the world he lived in-which also the film re-creates with a good deal of feeling for time and place-is nothing without the man. Like. every other filmgoer, I find people, any-

way, more interesting than paintings, or anything else for that matter. Lust for Lite gives, as far as I can see, a truthful account of the main events of van Gogh’s later life. It’s a "straight" biography made by people of integrity. Kirk Douglas, a good actor who strikingly resembles van Gogh, has no doubt done as well as he could and in the more dramatic passages is often impressive, even if his strong American accent is a sad handicap elsewhere. But I don’t think anyone who knows more than the bare facts of the artist’s life will feel after seeing the film that they know van Gogh better. The real reason he is ‘not seen in greater depth is in the script. Irving Stone’s dialogue was undistinguished, and I doubt whether Norman Corwin, who adapted it, has cone much to improve on it. And beyond this, apart from the extracts from the artist’s letters which provide an illuminating linking narrative, the film treatment as a whole never really gets inside its subject; van Gogh remains a tormented mysterious character. Even his relations with women, which seem to have been pretty influential, are treated only superficially-

an odd thing in an American movie when there was every excuse to do otherwise. I am -really sorry to make these reservations about a film which visually is so distinguished, and which even as biography is so much better than Moulin Rouge, the only comparable film I remember very clearly. But, incompletely realised, the best intentions are not good enough. One must add that Mr Douglas gets strongest support from James Donald _as van Gogh’s brother Theo-a sympathetic, sensitively read part-and from Anthony Quinn, typically virile as Gauguin.