Lust for Life is paint-by-numbers biopic stuff, with Kirk Douglas starring as Dutch Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh.1 You know the beats: our protagonist sacrifices for his art, endures failures of the heart, goes mad, dies. But the movie comes alive in its discussion of art theory. Vincent’s showdown with fellow artist Paul Gauguin (Anthony Quinn) begins as an argument about Jean-François Millet2 but morphs into an impassioned discussion about their respective visions of art. Gauguin asserts:
I’ve sacrificed everything [...] for a style, a style that’ll convey the mood of what I see…the idea, without regard for concrete reality. Art’s an abstraction, not a picture book. A painting is a flat surface covered with lines and colors arranged in a certain order [...] I choose to disregard nature.
Van Gogh argues against this, instead espousing the value of naked emotionality in art:
I don’t want control! I’m not afraid of emotion. When I paint the sun, I want the people to feel it revolving, giving off light and heat. When I paint a peasant, I want to feel the sun pouring into him like it does into the corn.
Maybe this highfalutin conversation reads as “boring,” but the performances from Douglas and Quinn make it electric. It’s also these disagreements that make the characters feel three-dimensional. And that vigorous artistic discussion between van Gogh and Gauguin? It’s so charged that it leads van Gogh to do the ear thing.
Rating: 7/10, I feel the sun pouring into the peasant like it does into the corn.
Cast and Crew
Vincente Minnelli is back for his third and final appearance in this column. This film reunites him with Kirk Douglas (we saw them together in The Bad and the Beautiful), but it’s a footnote in Minnelli’s filmography. Instead, he’s remembered as being one of the best directors of movie musicals, with a murderer’s row filmography that includes Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), An American in Paris (1951), Brigadoon (1954), and Gigi (1958). His final directorial effort, A Matter of Time (1976), starred Liza Minnelli, his daughter with Judy Garland. We won’t see Vincente again in this space, but we will see Liza.
This is also Kirk Douglas’ last rodeo in this column. After Lust for Life3, he starred in two of director Stanley Kubrick’s early films. The first, Paths of Glory4 in 1957, was an anti-war film where Douglas played a colonel in WWI whose troops disobey orders and are court-martialed. The other was a similarly anti-establishment work, Spartacus (1960), a movie about a slave rebellion that was really about HUAC.5 And, as with Vincente Minnelli’s daughter Liza, we will see Kirk’s nepo baby Michael Douglas in this column eventually.
Lust for Life was based on the Irving Stone biographic novel of the same name. To write it, Stone relied on the 600 extant letters Vincent wrote his brother Theo van Gogh. Stone also wrote “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” a biographic novel about Michelangelo, along with other biographic novels about John Adams and Mary Todd Lincoln and Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud.
The Trivia
Vinny committed suicide when he was just 37, but over his life he made thousands of artworks. His first major work was “The Potato Eaters,” which he painted while living in the Netherlands. Instead of the bright, sunny stylings of Impressionism, it instead featured browns and shadows that evoked the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and the Baroque period.
After a brief stay in Antwerp where he matriculated to and then quit the Academy of Fine Arts, van Gogh moved to Paris. There, he moved in with his art dealer brother Theo and developed relationships with artists Paul Signac, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. His painting became more colorful.
Van Gogh moved into the Yellow House in Arles, France and was visited by his friend Gauguin. Their relationship was complex and, in the movie at least, Gauguin’s threat of leaving led to the ear incident.6 Some of van Gogh's subjects at this point were sunflowers, chairs, cypress trees, orchards, and the café he drank absinthe in.
His last chapter was in Saint-Rémy at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum. He painted “The Starry Night” and “Irises” there. If you're being romantic, the swirling colors could represent the madness in his head, I guess. Eventually he left for a Paris suburb near his doctor, Paul Gachet, and it was while there that he shot himself in the chest with a revolver. 7
Vincent’s final words, which he said to Theo, were “the sadness will last forever.”
Odds and Ends
“Lust for Life” is the name of Lana Del Rey’s fifth studio album and Iggy Pop’s second solo album…though I criticized Anthony Quinn’s work in Viva Zapata!, his performance as Paul Gauguin absolutely steals the show8…Vincent’s regular order at the Arles café was said to be two coffees and three absinthes...Van Gogh mentions Jules Michelet, the author of “Historie of France” and coiner of the term “renaissance”9...climate protestors threw tomato soup at van Gogh's “Sunflowers” in October 2022...the van Gogh museum is in 2nd most popular museum in Amsterdam, after the Rijksmuseum.
Also, spoilers, we’re not done with Vincent van Gogh in this column. We’ll be seeing him, Theo, Paul Gauguin, and Dr. Paul Gachet again.
And yeah, this is our second 1950s biopic about a Post-Impressionist, coming on the heels of Moulin Rouge.
Millet (1814-1875) was a French artist of the Barbizon school (named for a French city) that moved art away from Romanticism and towards Realism. Gauguin calls Millet “that calendar artist with his dun-colored tones and sentimental insipidities” while van Gogh argues that Millet is “one of the few artists that ever really captured the human spirit here in the dignity of toil.” Check out “The Gleaners” and decide for yourself.
Here’s a great John Wayne / Kirk Douglas story from IMDB:
In [Kirk’s] memoir “The Ragman's Son” Douglas recounted that John Wayne attended a screening of [Lust for Life] and was horrified. “Christ, Kirk! How can you play a part like that? There's so few of us left. We got to play strong, tough characters. Not those weak queers,” Wayne said. Douglas tried to explain, “It's all make-believe, John. It isn't real. You're not really John Wayne, you know.” Wayne (born Marion Morrison) looked at him oddly, as if Douglas had betrayed him.
Paths of Glory gets its name from a poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” by Thomas Gray: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
You know the one. “I'M SPARTACUS,” “NO, I'M SPARTACUS,” ad infinitum. What you might not know is that Douglas insisting that the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo receive credit for Spartacus effectively ended the blacklist.
In actuality, no one really knows why van Gogh cut his own ear off. Afterwards, he was diagnosed with “acute mania with generalized delirium” and attested that he didn't remember what he had done.
In the film, Gachet asks van Gogh if he's “seen this Daumier”; Honoré Daumier, another French Realist painter (like Millet, discussed in Footnote 2) is known for “The Laundress.”
It takes a certain kind of actor to to pull off the line “Dignity? I’m talking about women, man. Women. I like ‘em fat, vicious, and not too smart.” It turns out that Quinn is that kind of actor. We’ll discuss him more when he snags his first Best Actor nomination in 1957.
Well, sorta. The idea of the time after the Middle Ages as a “rebirth” was coined by Giorgio Vasari, but Michelet took it and made it French.