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The wounds of art, its full neurotic panoply. Between Popeye and Travis Bickle, the Van Gogh of Kirk Douglas like Baudelaire's albatross, "quite hopeless" with normalcy yet soaring in the dolorous pursuit of form. The bedeviled seeker naturally begins with evangelism, the blessing and burden of hypersensitivity sharpened in Belgian mines. Rejected by the cousin (Jeanette Sterke), accepted by the prostitute (Pamela Brown) but only up to a point, drawings don't bring home the bacon. "The storm inside" finds an outlet, the Parisian impressionists have their own approaches (Pissarro advises against timidity, Seurat favors mathematical meticulousness). "With each painting, we die a little," so it goes with the ultimate Vincente Minnelli hero in a blur of ecstasy and anguish, living and dying by the tip of his brush. Sunflowers, weavers, starry nights, peasants and their potatoes, all grist for the Metrocolor mill. "An extraordinary exultation" on a diet of coffee and absinthe, cp. Journal d'un curé de campagne. The odd couple with Gauguin (Anthony Quinn), aesthete and brawler, bored with nature and alive to the demimonde. A realm not of harmonies, but of imbalances. "You paint too fast!" "You look too fast!" Window and mirror, one opens the world and the other gives the inner slash. The demonic urge dissolves from a street lamp to a blazing spiral on a canvas to an indoor oil lantern, an offscreen shriek completes the tableau. Two constants, the business pressures of creativity and the love of a brother (James Donald). Torment like a murder of crows, death like a shimmering field, "the iron wall between what I feel and what I can express" turned into a CinemaScope screen full of treasures. Altman and Pialat have their own surrogates to chase, and there's Becker's immediate response in Montparnasse 19. Cinematography by Russell Harlan and Freddie Young. With Everett Sloane, Henry Daniell, Madge Kennedy, Noel Purcell, Niall MacGinnis, Jill Bennett, Lionel Jeffries, Laurence Naismith, and Eric Pohlmann.
--- Fernando F. Croce |