Lust for Life (1956 film)

Lust for Life (The madman with red hair, in Spain, and Thirst for life, in Latin America) is a 1956 American biographical film about the life of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, it featured performances by Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, James Donald, Jill Bennett, Everett Sloane and Henry Daniell.

Lust for Life is based on Irving Stone's 1934 novel of the same name, with a screenplay by Norman Corwin and music by Hungarian-American composer Miklós Rózsa.

Plot

The film narrates the tribulations of Vincent Van Gogh from his initial attempts at religious preaching in the poor mining regions of Belgium to his contact with the innovative impressionist painters located in Paris, passing through his first contacts with painting in his native country (in which he drew the peasants performing the most daily tasks); his unstable love and friendship relationships, and the most important affective link he maintained in his eventful existence, his brother Theo, a family member who helped him throughout his life both as emotional support and as financial support so that Vincent could survive in the place where he lived. I was, it was Holland, Arles or Paris.

In such places he tried to develop his pictorial genius in contact with other artists (Seurat, Monet, Pissarro or his best friend: Paul Gauguin, played by Anthony Quinn, who would be awarded the Oscar for best supporting actor) and with its best influence: natural phenomena, light, sun, wind and stars. All this expressed with his invigorating sense of color and the thick and undulating line of it.

Cast

• Adeline Ravoux: Laurence Bady.
• Anna Cornelia van Gogh, Vincent's sister, Theo and Willemien: Madge Kennedy.
• Anton Mauve: Noel Purcell.
• Van Den Berghe: Noel Howlett.
• Dr. Bosman: Laurence Naismith.
• A waiter: Jay Adler.
• Camille Pissarro: David Leonard.
• Christine: Pamela Brown.
• Colbert: Eric Pohlmann.
• Ducrocq: John Ruddock.
• Émile Bernard: William Phipps.
• Dr. Gachet: Everett Sloane.
• Georges Seurat: David Bond.
• Gustave De Smet: Ronald Adam.
• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Jerry Bergen (without credit).
• Police Inspector Paul Bryar (s.a.)
• Johanna: Toni Gerry.
• Joseph Roulin, a mailman whose family made portraits of the painter during his stage in Arles: Niall MacGinnis.
• Kay: Jeanette Sterke.
• Paul Durand-Ruel, art dealer: Rex Evans (s. a.)
• Paul Gauguin: Anthony Quinn.
• Pere Tanguy: Frank Perls.
• Reverend Peeters: David Horne.
• Dr. Peyron: Lionel Jeffries.
• Rachel: Julie Robinson.
• Reverend Stricker: Wilton Graff.
• Mrs. Stricker: Isobel Elsom.
• Theo van Gogh: James Donald.
• Theodorus van Gogh, father of Vincent and Theo: Henry Daniell.
• Vincent van Gogh: Kirk Douglas.
• Willemien van Gogh, Vincent's sister, Theo and Anna Cornelia: Jill Bennett.

Comments

Miklós Rózsa, despite being the first composer to have an exclusive with a film company and having great successes, could not avoid the witch hunt that took place in Hollywood in the 40s and 50s. For this reason, in some films appears with pseudonyms instead of his name.

The idea of making a film about the life of Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh was an old project of Hollywood producers. In 1945, Warner Bros. was about to get it going, casting Paul Muni and John Garfield to play the leads, but then dropped it. In 1946, producer Arthur Freed commissioned novelist Irving Stone to write a script, but in the early 1950s he handed it over to producer-director Richard Brooks, who did nothing with it either.

However, Irving Stone took advantage of the research carried out on the painter's life to write Lust for Life, which was published in the first half of the 1950s to great sales success. Following the success of John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952), about the life of impressionist painter Toulouse Lautrec, Metro Goldwyn Mayer bought the film rights to Stone's work; Vincente Minnelli found out soon after and told Vice President Dore Schary that he was interested in directing the adaptation.

Dore Schary accepted his proposal, but with two very different conditions. First of all, he would have to shoot the musical Stranger in Paradise and then he would have to finish the Van Gogh biography before December 31, 1955. Irving Stone tired of this situation, which dragged along Almost ten years, he did not want to prolong the study's option on his work any longer, and he decided to personally direct a film based on it.

Despite being at the beginning of March, Minnelli promised to shoot A Stranger in Paradise (Kismet, 1955) immediately and finish the film about Van Gogh before by the end of the year, but only if it had John Houseman as executive producer, and Kirk Douglas as the lead, old collaborators with whom he had always worked perfectly.

Kirk Douglas agreed from the beginning and John Houseman only made it a condition that the reproductions of Van Gogh's paintings be done perfectly, so as not to fall into the usual mistakes of Hollywood movies about painters' lives. Thanks to this, from the beginning, a complex strategy was developed so that the reproductions of the paintings are as close as possible to the originals.

First, the original paintings were photographed on large 8 x 10-inch plates. Then they were projected under some special tables in the effects department, with a translucent board. And in this way, specialized personnel were able to copy them, brushstroke by brushstroke, with great care and perfect results.

Houseman and Minnelli decided not to shoot it in CinemaScope, because its long, narrow format is the opposite of framed, but studio executive Arthur Loewe convinced them otherwise. He explained to them that, given the expansion achieved by the new format, they will screen it in CinemaScope even if they shoot it in any other format. They had no choice but to accept it, but they demanded complete control over the negative and its subsequent treatment.

Since 20th Century Fox launched the Cinemascope with Henry Koster's The Robe (1953), it has generally been used with Eastmancolor negative. Composed of a brilliant mix of blues, reds and yellows, the result has little to do with reality, but much less with the color of Van Gogh's paintings.

Minnelli wants to shoot in Anscocolor negative, which he finds much more appropriate for the colors of the painter's palette, but faced with strong competition from Kodak, the Ansco factory has stopped producing negatives. Metro Goldwyn Mayer buys the last batch of Anscocolor negative, 300,000 feet, and convinces them to set up a special laboratory for development.

While Minnelli was shooting A Stranger in Paradise, Norman Corwin wrote the script under the close supervision of John Houseman, but Minnelli also did extensive research on the painter. He read all kinds of studies on Impressionist painters, and the five volumes of letters exchanged between the brothers Vincent and Theo van Gogh, and from there he drew a series of conclusions in which he supported his work.

A Stranger in Paradise was prepared during April 1955 and shot in May, June and part of July, but as both films make abundantly clear, during the filming of the musical Minnelli was much more concerned with researching Van Gogh and preparing The Madman with Red Hair as much as possible.

When Minnelli arrived in Arles in early August 1955 to begin filming, neither he nor Houseman were happy with the script they had in hand, but both had become Van Gogh experts. During the filming they modified the script as they discovered the historical truth and the real settings, where the painter lived the last years of his life.

The scenes between Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin varied a lot to reflect the truth of the relationship between the instinctive Gauguin and the ascetic Van Gogh. Apart from his great discrepancies in the purely artistic field, Gauguin is jealous of Van Gogh's pictorial work and he is jealous of the ease with which his friend relates to women.

They went to visit the asylum where Van Gogh was interned; There they spoke with the director and he lets them read the painter's clinical history. Houseman then rewrote the scenes, based on this new first-hand information, and Minnelli shot them in the asylum itself.

Given his physical resemblance to the painter, Kirk Douglas thought it was the role of a lifetime, as demonstrated when his company Bryna Productions bought the rights to a story about Van Gogh for him to star in. When Minnelli and Houseman offered him the role, he was delighted by this and by collaborating with them again, after the good experience of Captives of Evil . To fit his character as much as possible, he only had to grow his beard and give his hair a reddish tone.

Anthony Quinn was cast to play the loud, outgoing Paul Gauguin, but had his nose tweaked to make him more like the character. The rest of the cast was made up entirely of Europeans, but they decided not to worry about the wide diversity of accents.

The frames are integrated into the film in the most faithful way possible, both respecting their original format, as well as making slight panoramas over them or small zoom movements. They also proliferate on the walls and scattered on the floor in the house in Arles, and in Théo's house in Paris. Additionally, a collage of frames is used as the background for the end titles.

Over time, much of the painstaking care put into reproducing the original colors created by Van Gogh has been lost. The Eastmancolor positive from the Anscocolor negative used does not hold up as well as Technicolor, it has a tendency to turn brown over the years. For some time now, the copies that have been in circulation have very little to do with the coloring originally obtained by Minnelli.

Because of A Stranger in Paradise, Minnelli was only able to start filming at the beginning of August 1955, so she only had five months to finish it on the agreed date. Her main problem was not this, but that by then, the flowers begin to wither and the wheat fields are fallow. A specialized team from Metro Goldwyn Mayer kept a wheat field in all its splendor with the help of chemicals so that it can be filmed in it. Because of this they had to start at the end, with one of the most dramatic and difficult scenes, the painter's suicide.

For several days they traveled around Arles by car, stopping when they saw a landscape that reminded them of those painted by Van Gogh and then they rolled. They were followed by a van that not only carried the camera and the necessary technical elements, but also drawings and reproductions of paintings in different stages of preparation, to be able to film Van Gogh painting in any situation.

They filmed in the locations that are still preserved from the painter's time and reconstructed those destroyed by the passage of time. In Paris they filmed a brief scene, but transferred to Holland they filmed in the painter's hometown, in the family home and in the church where his preacher father officiated. The Borinage scenes were shot in Brussels, but they reproduced the sets of the coal mines in the studio. They discovered many people very similar to those who appear in Van Gogh's paintings, and convinced them to participate, suitably dressed, in scenes that reproduce them.

They returned to Hollywood to finish the interiors, with cinematographer Russell Harlan, an old specialist in westerns, but who achieves perfect lighting that reminded Minnelli of Vermeer. Most of the interiors were shot in the Culver City studios, but there were also some exteriors, such as the scene where Vincent Van Gogh goes to eat in the countryside with his cousin Kay and their son, tries to kiss her and she rejects him, which stands out from negative way on a set with an underline and achieved realistic and documentary tone.

Of these interior scenes shot in Hollywood there are two especially interesting, achieved and that show the high degree of effective virtuosity achieved by Minnelli. One is the famous one in which Van Gogh, desperate for his friend Gauguin's departure from Arles, cuts off his ear in a fit of madness. Shot in a single shot, the action is given through a skilful ellipsis as the camera approaches a mirror where the painter's face is reflected and then no longer reflected, underscored by an eloquent music by Miklos Rozsa.

The other is the scene in which, after leaving the asylum, Vincent arrives at his brother Théo's house in Paris to meet his wife and son. Narrated in a long, beautiful and effective shot-sequence with very different camera positions, it also uses the reflection of the group in a mirror to show Théo's concern regarding the behavior of his brother.

After an authentic race against time, nervous breakdowns and fights to get the film to have the quality desired by Minnelli and Houseman, but finish on schedule, it is finished before the end of 1955. It has received good reviews and was becomes its director's favorite film, which is extremely curious given that it has very little to do with the rest of his work.

On the one hand, Vincent Van Gogh is one of the most characteristic Minnellian characters. He is torn between reality and dream, he struggles to make his fantasies come true, but against most of them he does not succeed, or at least he does not succeed in life, nor does the film pick it up, he takes it for granted. understood. In addition, Minnelli identifies with him in his past as a painter, but above all as the creator who desperately fights to see his dreams come true.

For the first time, however, Minnelli shows an interest in realism. She abandons her beloved studios where she gains complete control over the elements at stake to go on location shoots abroad and manages to give the film a tone that is as documentary as it is dramatic.

Based on a voice-over taken from the numerous intertwined correspondence between Théo and Vincent Van Gogh, it has an abundance of scenes shot outdoors with an underlined documentary tone, but reconstructed. This does not prevent him from using all kinds of tricks, including cartoons in one of the final scenes where the crows attack him while he paints, to achieve the desired realism.

This change in style only shows the complete maturity reached by Minnelli and also his ability to work in a new register, but it does not change his conception of cinema. She still wields the CinemaScope with rare skill, but just as she shoots her usual sumptuous sequence shots at the right moments, at others she resorts to far more choppy planning in keeping with the dramatic needs of the scene.

It narrates the life of Vincent van Gogh with great delicacy, chronologically and using the voice-over to make large ellipses and play at will and ability with time, but at the same time it tells a story with a high content dramatic, makes some considerations about art.

Awards and nominations

Awards

• Oscar 1957 Award: the best secondary actor (Anthony Quinn).
• 1957 Golden Globe Award: the best film actor – drama (Kirk Douglas).
• NYFCC 1956 Award: the best actor (Kirk Douglas).

Candidacies

• Oscar Prize 1957: the best main actor (Kirk Douglas).
• Oscar 1957 Award: Best Art Direction (Cedric Gibbons, Hans Peters, E. Preston Ames, Edwin B. Willis, F. Keogh Gleason).
• Oscar Prize 1957: the best adapted script (Norman Corwin).
• Oscar Prize 1957: to the best film – drama.
• Oscar 1957 Award: the best director – cinema (Vincente Minnelli).
• Oscar 1957 Award: the best secondary actor (Anthony Quinn).