Moulin Rouge (film)

• Release Date: 1952
• Director(s): John Huston
• Writer(s): John Huston; Anthony Veiller
• Principal Actors and Roles: Jose Ferrer (Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; The Comte de Toulouse-Lautrec); Suzanne Flon (Myriamme Hayam); Zsa Zsa Gabor (Jane Avril); Walter Crisham (Valentin le Desossé); Katherine Kath (La Goulue); Colette Marchand (Marie Charlet); Muriel Smith (Aicha)
• Book / Story Film Based On: Moulin Rouge by Pierre La Mure

The 1953 Oscar-winning film Moulin Rouge is a study of the life of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the great nineteenth century French artist. The movie is based on a fictionalized account of the famous artist’s life by a French writer named Pierre LaMure. Director and screenwriter John Huston had wanted to do a movie about Toulouse-Lautrec’s life, and he wanted Jose Ferrer to play the lead role. When he contacted the actor, he learned that Ferrer had already optioned LaMure’s book to turn it into a play.

The two men then decided to collaborate on the movie and set out to deliver a realistic, complex depiction of the famed painter. Although their objective was new, their subject matter was far from unique. This 1953 film would be the third movie with the title Moulin Rouge. The first was a 1934 comedy starring Constance Bennett and Franchot Tone, which was followed in 1940 by a Josephine Baker vehicle. But neither of the earlier films focused on the great painter and his bohemian lifestyle in Paris.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was the scion of an old aristocratic family. He deserted his country family for the bohemian life of Montmarte in Paris during the 1880s. It was there that Toulouse-Lautrec painted the dancing girls, drunks, and prostitutes of the scandalous district and lived happily in their world. He paid a price for this dissolute life, however, dying in 1901 at age thirty-six, but he gained immortality with his paintbrush.

Plot

The film opens in 1890 Paris with patrons jostling their way into the Moulin Rouge cabaret. The Moulin Rouge had opened in 1889. Inside the cabaret, a young artist, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, empties a bottle of cognac. He sketches the dancers in the club, and as he works, the other characters—nightclub regulars—are introduced. A key female character, Jane Avril, flirts with and teases the patrons; two dancers get into a fight; and the owner, Maurice Joyant, offers Henri a month of free drinks in exchange for a promotional poster.

When the club closes and the cabaret empties, Henri stands up to walk home, and it is then that the audience finally learns that he is only four feet tall. A flashback reveals that Henri was crippled by a fall down some stairs; the flashback also reveals that he suffered from a congenital defect that allowed his body to achieve adult proportions even as his legs remained stunted his whole life.

Despite pain from his poorly healed injury, Henri finds solace in his art. His talent begins to blossom, and he gains a sense of joie de vivre, an overwhelming joy that results from the glow of his father’s intense love. His happiness is destroyed, however, when, as a young man, he proposes to the woman he loves; however, she rejects him, telling him that no woman will ever love him. He flees to Paris in search of a new life as a painter.

The flashback ends as Henri meets Marie, a prostitute played exceptionally well by a French ballerina named Colette Marchand. Henri falls in love when Marie claims to be indifferent to his misshapen legs, but the relationship is stormy. After a fight in which Marie tells Henri that no real woman could ever be attracted to him, he goes on a bender. He gets so drunk that his landlady asks his mother for help.

After he reunites with Marie, she nearly destroys him by telling him she tolerated their relationship only to get money for her boyfriend; she finds his touch repulsive. Aghast, Henri returns to his apartment, where he decides to kill himself. He turns on the gas vents in his apartment and sits down. But he is saved by his art, suddenly deciding to finish the poster he promised Maurice. He picks up a paintbrush and shuts off the gas.

The poster and its artist are instantly notorious, and the Moulin Rouge suddenly draws a higher class of customer. The movie follows Henri’s life over the next ten years as he paints Parisian nightlife. By 1900, he is famous and admired, but he is still profoundly lonely.

He meets a woman named Myriamme and falls for her, but tragically, he never understands that she loves him as well. She finally marries someone else, but first she sends him a letter declaring her love for him. She has left the city by the time the letter reaches Henri, and he is unable to find her.

He obsessively reads and rereads her letter while drinking heavily. One night while in his apartment, he experiences the DTs, or delirium tremens, a symptom of alcohol withdrawal. During this episode, Henri hallucinates images of cockroach-covered walls and falls down a flight of stairs. He is taken to his family home to die. At the end, he has a vision of all the denizens of the Moulin Rouge entering the room to say a final goodbye.

Significance

In the long-standing tradition of biopics about artist’s lives, Moulin Rouge stands out. It broke new ground in a number of ways. Most important was its use of color. Huston wanted to replicate the pallet of Toulouse-Lautrec’s artwork, but he was required by the studio to use the Technicolor process. He felt the contrasts in Technicolor were too sharp, so he and the director of photography, Oswald Morris, captured the quality of the artist’s work by using color filters and blue-green backgrounds shot through with yellow, pink, and orange. Morris overcame the brightness of Technicolor by using different-colored spotlights to change the tones of shadows and lighted areas.

Jose Ferrer played both Henri and his father. Turning Ferrer into Henri required some movie magic, with Huston and the actor working together to use tricks like troughs, camera angles, and short stand-ins to convincingly present the artist’s stunted legs. Ferrer also devised kneepads as well as straps to bind his bent legs to his torso so he could walk on his knees. His efforts to assume the role became famous.

Moulin Rouge was a financial and critical success. It received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Editing; and it won for Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design. The project was an individual success for Ferrer, who received 40 percent of the movie’s income.

And no one who was alive for a few years following the release of the film could miss hearing its theme song, which was ubiquitous on the radio. Titled "Where Is Your Heart," it became so popular that it is still more commonly known as "The Theme Song from Moulin Rouge."

Awards and nominations

Won

• Academy Award (1952) Best Art Direction (Color)
• Academy Award (1952) Best Costume Design (Color): Marcel Vertès

Nominated

• Academy Award (1952) Best Film Editing ()
• Academy Award (1952) Best Picture
• Academy Award (1952) Best Director: John Huston
• Academy Award (1952) Best Actor (): Jose Ferrer
• Academy Award (1952) Best Supporting Actress: Colette Marchand

Bibliography

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MacDonald, Laurence E. The Invisible Art of Film Music: A Comprehensive History. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2013. Print.

Meyers, Jeffrey. John Huston: Courage and Art. New York: Crown Archetype, 2011. Electronic.

"Moulin Rouge." IMDb. IMDb.com, Inc., n.d. Web. 7 Feb. 2016. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044926>.

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.

Pomerance, Murray, ed. American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2005. Print.