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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
John Huston's Greatest!, 10 Sep 2001
By A Customer
This most beautiful and moving of films still haunts me seeing it again after several years. Jose Ferrers' finest performance (on screen anyway) and brilliant use of colour from a true artist Cinematographer, Oswald Morris, who was robbed at the Academy Awards in 1952 by not winning! A truly great film in every respect and although a fictional account of the dwarfish artist Toulouse Lautrec, which biopic isn't? In my view this is John Hustons' most underrated work and should stand alongside The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen as his greatest. Heaven knows what Buz Luhmann is going to churn out with his planned remake!
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
No Absinthe of Malice?, 25 Sep 2005
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.
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7 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
It should have been an Oscar winner, 13 Jan 2002
Moulin RougeJohn Huston, one of the all-time great movie producers, has made a remarkable film of the life of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, arguably the most exciting painter of the Belle Epoque and a member of one of the foremost aristocratic families at the time, in France. Huston managed in this film to come as close as possible to showing us what really made the artist tick. As a you boy Lautrec fell from a flight of stairs and broke both his legs. They never mended properly or grew again and the accident left him cippled for life. In spite of this, he left the save surroundings of his home and went to Paris to become a painter, where, in the eyes of his family, he lived a scandalous life. Particularly his father, the Count of Toulouse, never understood his son. Only shorly before his early death, When Henri became the first living painter ever, whose paintings were accepted by the Louvre, did he realize what a genius his son had been. Huston made this life story into a very moving film, with an excellent cast. José Ferrer played the hero, which was physically a nearly impossible achievement, showing us the insight of a tortured soul. Colette Marchand created the character of Marie, a low-life prostitute, who was possibly the only woman, Lautrec ever loved. Zaza Gabor is Jane Avril, the only ray of light in this sad story. In this film Huston made for the first time in movie history use of color, as a dramatic instrument. It was no longer "decoration", but a valuable means to give every scene its full and very special impact. In my view, the film should have been the 1952 Oscar winner, but instead, the title went to "The greatest show on Earth".
It is a pity that the technical quality of the DVD is not up to the very best present-day standards.
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