Moulin Rouge [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

For those younger viewers who have not seen this movie,believe me,this is the definitive version of Tolouse Laterec's sad life . The dramatisation and musical interludes are superlative and the technicolour is still stunning despite its age.The movie gives you the true atmosphere and "smell" of what the Moulin Rouge would have been like in the period depicted.The DVD transfer is very good.Do not miss it !

This costume drama features a serviceable screenplay from John Huston that tries hard to inject some life into the notoriously dead hand of biopic drama, and Huston as director elicits a thoughtful and unsentimental performance from Jose Ferrer as Henri Toulouse de Lautrec, the aristocratic recorder of Parisian low life. Not only does he look the part, not far off a ringer for the man from his photographs, but he captures his melancholia and alcoholism, as well as the essential though often concealed sympathy that he possessed for the social condition of his subjects.
Ferrer is well served by the actresses playing his various women friends with the inevitable exception of Zsa Zsa Gabor's mangling of the part of the cabaret artiste Jane Avril. This preposterous woman (Gabor, not Avril) does her best with her wooden movement and harsh tones (a sort of cross between Esther Rantzen and Judy in a Punch-and-Judy seaside show) to bring the movie to a grinding halt; an eminent reviewer tells us that Huston tended to favour interesting characters over great actors, adding that "Gabor is perfect for the part: she doesn't need to act, just be herself" which just goes to show that even Homer nods occasionally.

But the outstanding feature of the picture is its visualisation of 1890s Paris, with sets, art direction, lighting, costumes and shimmering Technicolor combining to splendid effect. The first 15 mins are given over to the Moulin Rouge's can-can dancers (which means that dramatic thrust loses out at the outset to spectacle, and biopics generally cannot afford such a loss), and the eye is entranced by subsequent re-creations of some of Lautrec's poster art and pastel paintings, as well as of Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergere, one of the world's greatest paintings. You can see it in London at the Courtauld Institute, along with several paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec, in its small but very choice collection of impressionist and post-impressionist works.

Question: Why is the DVD version not available in the UK?

Many of those who have seen the film directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Nicole Kidman (2001) may not know about this film which appeared about 50 years earlier. Based on Pierre LaMure's biographical novel and directed by John Huston, this Moulin Rouge focuses entirely on the life of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Two years previously, Jose Ferrer received an Academy Award for leading actor in Cyrano de Bergerac. He was nominated again in 1952 for his portrayal of Toulouse Lautrec (he also plays the painter's father, Comte Alphonse de Toulouse-Lautrec, a small but significant role in this film), losing to Gary Cooper (High Noon).

How interesting that each of Ferrer's two greatest performances on-screen is of a French aristocrat with a significant physical deformity who encounters only failure and despair in his love life. In any event, Ferrer is brilliant in a cast of consistently high quality. As chanteuse Jane Avril, Zsa Zsa Gabor essentially plays herself: beautiful, vain, melodramatic, self-absorbed, good-hearted, and charming. Also noteworthy are Colette Marshand (as Marie Charlet), Suzanne Flon (Myrianne Haven), Katherine Kath (La Goulue), and Christopher Lee (Georges Seurat). Although nominated for several Academy Awards, this film received only two (for Color Art Direction and Color Costume Design), both richly deserved. Huston skillfully directs an excellent cast while blending seamlessly Oswald Morris' cinematography with George Auric's musical score.

Born in 1864, Toulouse-Lautrec spent his childhood years on family estates near Albi, with Paris becoming his home in 1872. The victim of a genetic bone condition that made him vulnerable to fractures, he walked with a cane by age thirteen and grew to be only four feet eleven inches tall. One example of Huston's genius is the fact that much of the film is shot from Toulouse-Lautrec's perspective. That is, we see the aristocrat-artist's world almost literally through his eyes as he sits and sketches in the music hall, then drags himself to his stunted feet and slowly, painfully resumes his late-night debauchery.

In frail health throughout his adult years, Toulouse-Lautrec exacerbated his situation with alcoholism which no doubt hastened his death in 1901. Lying in bed and near death, he learns from his astonished father that his paintings will be on exhibition at the Louvre. ("The Louvre, Henri, the Louvre! I did not know, Henri, I did not understand....") This final scene reminds me of the final scene in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), starring Robert Donat. Both Toulouse-Lautrec and Charles Chipping are near death, barely conscious. Both imagine being visited by those they once knew, bidding them a fond farewell. For Toulouse-Lautrec, the performers from the Moulin Rouge; for Chipping, many of the boys he taught over a period of several decades at Brookfield School.

This film is a feast for the eyes. At least for about two hours, it enables us to return to Paris near the end of the 19th century, to a world which remains vivid in the great art of Seaurat, Renoir, Degas, Monet, Manet, Bonnard....and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.