Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956)

Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn in Lust for Life

Cast: Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, James Donald, Pamela Brown, Everett Sloane, Niall McGinnis, Noel Purcell, Henry Daniell, Madge Kennedy, Jill Bennett, Lionel Jeffries, Laurence Naismith, Jeanette Sterke. Screenplay: Norman Corwin, based on a novel by Irving Stone. Cinematography: Russell Harlan, Freddie Young. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons, Hans Peters. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: Miklós Rózsa.

After watching Julian Schnabel's take on Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity's Gate (2018), I thought it made sense to go back and see Hollywood's portrait of the artist, Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life. Schnabel is himself an artist, of course, so it's not surprising to find his film focused on the aesthetics of madness (along with propounding a theory that Van Gogh didn't commit suicide but was the victim of an accidental gunshot). Minnelli and screenwriter Norman Corwin are less successful in finding a coherent image of Van Gogh than Schnabel and his co-screenwriters Jean-Claude Carrière and Louise Kugelberg were, partly because the latter were working with one of the most insightful actors of our time, Willem Dafoe, while Minnelli's Van Gogh is played by Kirk Douglas, who brings to the role a physical resemblance to the artist but is never quite strong enough to craft an integrated characterization. Lust for Life seems to suggest that Van Gogh's problems stemmed from a lack of reciprocated love -- from his father, the church he tries to serve, the several women in his life, the art-buying public, the citizens of Arles, and his fellow artists -- most notably Paul Gauguin, played (perhaps overplayed) by Anthony Quinn in an Oscar-winning performance. The film is visually stunning, although the transformation of the landscapes that Van Gogh sees into what he painted is handled more subtly and intelligently in Schnabel's film. Minnelli seems content merely to juxtapose place with painting. The sensational events in Van Gogh's life, especially the amputation of an ear, are treated sensationally in Minnelli's film, which only suggests that Van Gogh did it out of frustration with Gauguin, as if pleading for that artist's attention. We also get a sentimental deathbed scene, a kind of reconciliation with Vincent's brother, Theo (James Donald). Lust for Life is a watchable but flawed and inconsistent film -- even the name of the artist gets a variety of pronunciations, from "Van Gokh" to "Van Gog" to "Van Goh."