LUST FOR LIFE (1956) C widescreen 122m dir: Vincente Minnelli

w/Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, James Donald, Pamela Brown, Everett Sloane, Niall MacGinnis, Noel Purcell, Henry Daniell, Madge Kennedy, Jill Bennett, Lionel Jeffries, Laurence Naismith, Eric Pohlmann, Jeanette Sterke, Toni Gerry, Wilton Graff, Isobel Elsom, David Horne, Noel Howlett, Ronald Adam, John Ruddock, Julie Robinson, David Leonard, William Phipps, David Bond, Frank Perls, Jay Adler, Laurence Badie

Terrific film about the the turbulent personal life of artist Vincent Van Gogh, masterfully portrayed by Douglas. Anthony Quinn won his second Oscar for his performance as Van Gogh's close friend and severest critic, artist Paul Gauguin.

From The Movie Guide: "Lust for Life was optioned by MGM in 1947, but it took almost nine years before the studio finally filmed Irving Stone's immensely popular fictionalized biography of Vincent Van Gogh. ...

"LUST FOR LIFE tells a tragic story, but the portrait of Van Gogh's uncompromised genius is also inspiring. Douglas gives an appropriately fiery star turn as Van Gogh, delivering some of the best work of his career. With typical dedication, Douglas even went so far as to take extensive painting lessons for the role. Quinn, in a relatively small part, is also excellent as the moody Gauguin, who attempts to befriend his fellow genius.

"Director Vincente Minnelli fought in vain against using CinemaScope for this film, feeling that 'the dimensions of the wider screen [bore] little relation to the conventional shape of paintings.' Minnelli also felt that the candybox Eastmancolor MGM used did not offer the soft tones he needed to reproduce Van Gogh's world and art. He described the color process as being 'a brilliant mixture of blues, reds, and yellows that resembled neither life nor art.' With producer [John] Houseman's support, Minnelli hounded MGM executives into buying up all the remaining film stock from the discontinued Ansco process, and the company responded by opening a special laboratory to process his footage. Houseman and Minnelli also searched out surviving contemporaries of the great artist, visited locales when [sic] Van Gogh lived and worked, and managed to film 200 of the painter's masterworks (located around the world) without subjecting them to the dangers of standard movie lighting."

From the Film Comment website (www.filmcomment.com), this 2016 article about the film by Steven Mears:

"Kirk Douglas acts like Vincent Van Gogh paints: with bold strokes, dazzling colors, and displays of passion sometimes alarming to witness. Proponents of understatement may blanch at the raw emotion of his performances, but there’s no denying that Douglas --- who turns 100 on December 9 --- withholds nothing from the camera. To see him play tortured characters is akin to watching Van Gogh in his wheat field, making manifest his demons on canvas.

"For that reason, his portrait of the anguished Dutch painter in Vincent Minnelli’s 1956 biopic Lust for Life is both inspired and inevitable, the culmination of the private mania that had been simmering since his debut film, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.

“'I always worked on the theory that, when you played a weak character, find a moment when he’s strong, and if you’re playing a strong character, find a moment when he’s weak,' the actor has said. That layering of contradictions brings psychological complexity to every role he attacks. If his leader of a slave revolt against the armies of Rome in Spartacus is a study in martyrdom with palpable traces of pride, his Van Gogh exemplifies a fatally reckless yearning to be useful. In Douglas’s interpretation, the mighty are flawed and the flawed are mighty.

"Van Gogh’s all-consuming hunger for connection, which his own intensity obstructs, is brilliantly enacted by Douglas: the man whose paintings now fetch eight figures at auction could not find a steadfast friend in life, or even a consistent parasite. 'I’m in a cage of shame and self-doubt and failure!' Vincent rails to his brother and benefactor Theo (James Donald), envying those with purpose and those content to be idle. Desperate to channel his impotent fervor into something constructive, he pours himself into faith, then love, then art. Each affords only short-lived fulfillment, as organized religion proves too strict for his indiscriminate humanism, personal relationships crash on the rocks of his obstinacy, and rank insecurity blights his self-expression. He craves the approval of colleagues like Paul Gauguin (Anthony Quinn), with whom he briefly cohabitates, but the macho Frenchman is repelled by his acolyte’s childlike need and perplexed by the anarchy of his work ('You paint too fast!').

"Minnelli, who began his career as a theatrical set designer, had a bold visual sense and a flair for color, as well as an intuitive grasp of artistic temperaments on screen and off. He and Douglas were ideal collaborators, and he stated that his star 'achieved a moving and memorable portrait of the artist --- a man of massive creative power, triggered by severe emotional stress, the fear and horror of madness.' Douglas practiced painting crows so he would appear credible at the easel, and he’s entirely persuasive in thrall to inspiration, holding his brush like a weapon and stabbing the canvas like he’s fencing with the storms in his mind.

"In terms of outward sparring partners, Gauguin proves the most formidable. Quinn won an Oscar for his robust supporting work, but as spectacularly as he fares as a sort of proto-Hemingway --- dispensing supercilious advice and dogmatic opinions, deploring sentimentality and unmanly displays --- his performance owes much of its power to his co-star. Without Van Gogh’s obsessive hero-worship and acute loneliness, so movingly rendered by Douglas, Gauguin’s insults and rejection would carry no weight. Douglas conjures Van Gogh’s fogs and frenzies without vanity or inhibition (reflected in Miklos Rozsa’s dizzying score), but he’s equally affecting in moments of quiet vulnerability, as when he croaks to Theo that his attacks of hysteria leave him helpless, like a crab on its back. His relationship to self-harm forms a disquieting plot thread, as he condemns suicide as 'terrible' and 'unthinkable,' but in windows of self-awareness grows mindful of its inexorability.

"Douglas the actor was mindful too --- of his striking physical resemblance to his subject, of being the same age as Van Gogh when he scattered the crows with a shot, and of the degree to which he’d identify with the man, as one fervid artist to another. 'I don’t want control! I’m after emotion,' Vincent proclaims to Gauguin; one imagines this role revealed to Douglas that one comes at the expense of the other."

Besides the Oscar that Quinn was awarded for Supporting Actor, the film was also nominated for Best Actor (Douglas), Adapted Screenplay (Norman Corwin), and Color Art Direction (Cedric Gibbons, Hans Peters, E. Preston Ames, Edwin B. Willis, F. Keogh Gleason).