Moulin Rouge, a nominee for Best Picture of 1952, is as vibrant and colorful as the art done by the man who is the film's primary subject, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Perhaps best known for the lithographs advertising such nightclubs as the Moulin Rouge, Toulouse-Lautrec was an artist of the underclass, people whose lives revolve around the world of darkness. Director John Huston uses a couple of montages to introduce the work of Toulouse-Lautrec to the movie-going audience, but the focus is primarily upon the rather sad life of the man himself. What a significant contrast there is between his personal life and the bright images captured in his artwork.
Jose Ferrer, who had won Best Actor two years earlier for his portrayal of Cyrano de Bergerac, has the difficult task of inhabiting the body of a man whose legs were damaged in a fall and stopped growing. Ferrer had to walk on his knees at times with his legs strapped behind him; this was before the advent of computer-generated imagery, after all. At times, we see Toulouse-Lautrec in long shots, no doubt making it easier to fool the eye, but it must have been murder on Ferrar's knees when he had to be shown in a medium shot. I admire his dedication to the role, but I have to admit that I find him just as stagey and overly dramatic here as in his Oscar-winning role.
The film begins with a performance by two pairs of dancers at the Moulin Rouge nightclub. The women in the pairs are particularly vigorous in their dancing and are obviously rivals for attention. While they are dancing the can-can and pushing and kicking each other, Toulouse-Lautrec sits at his usual table sketching away on paper covering the table. Most of these sketches are rough, certainly, but they show the talent he has for capturing movement. The owner of the Moulin Rouge even offers to give him free drinks for a month if Toulouse-Lautrec will turn one of his drawings into a poster. Given that he is a somewhat insatiable alcoholic, Toulouse-Lautrec accepts the challenge.
On his way home from the nightclub, Toulouse-Lautrec starts to reminisce. We get a series of flashbacks of his childhood as the son of the Comte and Countess of Toulouse-Lautrec, first cousins who married each other. We are witness to the horrible fall down a staircase that led to his short stature. Despite attempts by several doctors, his legs just stop growing, leaving the rest of his body disproportionate to them. We, sadly, also have to witness the rejection he faces from women who consider him to be freakish. They make some of the cruelest remarks to him, such as claiming that he will never find anyone to love him. It's a lot of information for a flashback sequence to carry, but I suppose it's quicker than depicting all of these events from his first 26 years in greater detail and in a more chronological order. It does make for a very long walk.
Before he reaches his apartment that night, he meets Marie Charlet (played by newcomer Colette Marchand), a prostitute on the run from the police. He takes her back to his place after lying to an officer about her whereabouts for the evening. She likes the place because it has a tub and because he gives her money for a new dress, so she stays, at least for a while. It's quite apparent that Toulouse-Lautrec is trying to rescue Marie from her life on the streets and that he has fallen in love with her. However, she often disappears for the night, leaving him jealous and distraught. When he tries to paint her portrait, she demands money from him because he pays models to pose for him. It's a rather dysfunctional relationship, to be honest. She seems to be in love with another man, Babare (Walter Cross), and can't really give up being a prostitute for Toulouse-Lautrec's benefit. When he confronts her in a bar that she frequents, she calls him "a runt and a cripple," shocking even the other bar patrons.
Distraught over Marie's behavior, Toulouse-Lautrec goes home and turns on the gas with the intention of committing suicide. Instead, he starts to finish a painting of the dancers at the Moulin Rouge and decides to turn the gas back off. We are meant to understand that at this moment he has decided to devote his life to his art rather than to love. What follows is a sequence where he seemingly invents the process for reproducing bright colors in a lithograph, and his first masterpiece, called "La Goulue" after the dancer who inspired it, becomes a controversial hit on the streets of Paris. Even though opinion is divided, everyone is talking about his work, including his father (also played by Ferrer), who is appalled at the subject matter.
Ten years pass and Toulouse-Lautrec is on his way home when he sees a woman on a bridge. He thinks she is contemplating suicide, but instead she is merely throwing away a key that was given to her by a lover who wants to keep her but not marry her. After another chance encounter with this woman, they begin attending the theater and going to dinner together and taking in other social events. Myriamme (played by Suzanne Flon) begins to fall in love with him, but he does not return her affections. In fact, he seems completely oblivious to her attentions, perhaps as a consequence of his earlier mistreatment by Marie. He has become very bitter about love and romance as the years have passed. After they meet her old flame Marcel at the race track--he's played by a young Peter Cushing--she confronts Toulouse-Lautrec about her feelings and then decides to go back to her former lover. Toulouse-Lautrec starts drinking heavily, well, heavier than he was already drinking, which was pretty heavy anyway. He falls down another staircase and winds up dying in a bed at his family's estate.
By focusing on these two periods in Toulouse-Lautrec's life, the time of his first success and his later period of fame, Moulin Rouge does miss an opportunity to provide a full portrait of the artist. For the sake of brevity, we are given only highlights of his brief life, the flashback sequence to his childhood being a prime example. The rest of the movie is primarily about his relationships with Marie and with Myriamme. I know we shouldn't expect a biographical film to be completely accurate, but quite a few of the details are significantly wrong here. For example, Toulouse-Lautrec didn't break both of his legs at the same time; the accidents were a year apart. He also didn't die as a result of another fall; his death is usually attributed to the consequences of alcoholism and syphilis. I suppose those are small matters to dispute, and admittedly, you couldn't have talked about syphilis in a mainstream Hollywood film in 1952, but the emphasis on Toulouse-Lautrec's relationships with a prostitute and with a woman whose love he doesn't return gives an inordinate sense of importance to those relationships.
The description above perhaps makes the film sound pretty mundane, and in many ways, it is. Making the artist's life your focus, in this particular case, means an unhappy plot overall. However, there are several aspects of the film that make it interesting to watch. The performances at the nightclub are spectacular, especially the athletic can-can dancing. There's such a flurry of petticoats during those dance numbers, it's tough to keep track of how many people are actually on the dance floor. Even though she has a small part, it's also a delight to see Zsa Zsa Gabor as an egocentric singer. Her singing was dubbed, of course, and you can easily tell she's not proficient at lip syncing, but when she goes on about her latest conquest, you can't help but smile. And, of course, there are the paintings themselves. Toulouse-Lautrec called himself a "painter of the streets and of the gutter," yet he found such beauty in the places he drew that it's enjoyable just to watch the montages of his work flash across the screen.
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