BEFORE: Everett Sloane, who played Rocky Graziano's boxing manager, carries over into today's film, where he plays "Dr. Gachet". And that will bring my linking chain to an abrupt end, because I've got nowhere to go from here - no Kirk Douglas films, nothing. But fear not, there is a plan - which I'll explain tomorrow. I knew this break was coming, and I'll be taking a break from actors in general, as well as the narrative form.
THE PLOT: The life of brilliant but tortured artist Vincent Van Gogh.
AFTER: As a young student, all I really knew about Van Gogh was the fact that he was a painter, and that he cut off his own ear to give to a woman. But that second story isn't really true - is it? I mean, that was an urban legend, right? What woman would be impressed by receiving a man's ear as a gift? "Oh, Vincent, you shouldn't have. No, really, you should NOT have done that." Here she is, expecting a box of chocolates or maybe a piece of jewelry, and she unwraps a body part. WTF?
But let's back up a bit. The film starts with Van Gogh's early career as a priest, catering to small mining town. His father was a minister and he hoped to become one himself, so he studied theology, but failed his exams, leading the missionary school leaders to assign him to a post in a coal-mining district. According to this film, he lived among the poor workers, sleeping on straw in a small hut, in order to better understand them and minister to them. This got him in "Dutch" with the church leaders, who thought he shouldn't mix with his parishioners, and shouldn't dress like them or live like them. This led him to reject organized religion, but not God in general. I can get behind that as a philosophy.
I noticed some similarities here to last night's film "Somebody Up There Likes Me", released the same year as this one, 1956. Now, you might think that a biopic about a boxer and and artist would be quite different, but look at how Rocky Graziano failed out of school, took to crime, bailed out of the army, and finally fell backwards into boxing. Van Gogh failed out of school, bailed out of religion, and then sort of fell backwards into painting. There's a sort of common thread that runs through both stories.
Vincent's brother, Theo, convinced him to contact a prominent Dutch artist, which led to Van Gogh attending art school (not depicted in this film, I'm sort of mixing the film story with real history) where he learned the basics of anatomy and perspective and such. When Vincent moved to the countryside with his parents, this led to his first drawings, charcoal sketches of common men, people working in the fields. While Degas was painting ballet dancers and Toulouse-Lautrec was in the nightclubs, Van Gogh was out in the fields, dressed like a shepherd and gaining an appreciation for landscapes of Belgium.
This also led to him putting the moves on his recently-widowed cousin, who had an 8-year old son. She rejected Vincent, and let's just say he didn't take that well. This caused a rift in the family, to say the least, and Vincent was on the outs with his uncle AND his father, leading him to move to the Hague. The film omits the time Vincent spent in a hospital, recovering from gonorrhea, but picks up with his domestic relationship with an alcoholic prostitute who had a young daughter. These were the salad days, where Vincent was relatively happy and content, but his simple monastic life and devotion to painting supposedly drove her away. (Right, because there were absolutely NO other issues in that relationship....)
But then everything changed with the dawn of Impressionism - Monet, Renoir and Seurat were catching on in Paris (although their art was also presumably facing much resistance, from the uptight art community) and to me, the most fascinating part was seeing Van Gogh in Paris for the first time, caught up in this new world of art depicting feelings and emotions, not exactly depicting what the eye might see, but something more abstract. Van Gogh meets Gauguin, he goes to an exhibition of Monet, he has a debate with Seurat over whether the use of color should be mathematical or not. (How could Seurat paint an outdoor scene while remaining indoors? Because he wasn't painting a real landscape.)
Thus, Van Gogh is considered "Post-impressionist", according to general thought (and Wikipedia). Meaning he saw what the impressionists were doing, considered it, and adapted their style into his - leading him to go out and paint landscapes and buildings, but he was then free to paint them not exactly as they appear - and that's how you get something like "Starry Night". Once freed from the bonds of realism, Van Gogh could paint a night sky to show the way it made him feel.
The only problem therefore being - Van Gogh had SOME kind of trouble, but we may never know exactly what it was. Madness? Loneliness? Or did he just never get over his first cousin? Was he tormented by guilt for not living up to his father's legacy, or was he just a typical struggling painter, whose true talent was not recognized during his lifetime? Was there a medical reason for his seizures and hallucinations, or was it just the result of strong drink such as absinthe? And did his painting help or hurt whatever condition he had?
And, if I'm reading between the lines here, is this film saying that Van Gogh was gay? Sure, he lived with a female prostitute, but he also lived with Paul Gauguin, right? They seemed to have sort of an "Odd Couple" situation - Gauguin was neat, Van Gogh was messy. Van Gogh seems very happy when Gauguin moves in, even though they bicker over the rules of art - and during a notable sequence in the film, after Gauguin decides to move out, Van Gogh goes a little mad, and that's when he hacks off his own ear. Now, obviously people in the 1880's didn't discuss things like sexual preference, and it was barely even referred to in 1956 when this film was made, so how much of this is historical fact, and how much of this comes from the director, Vincente Minnelli, who may have been married to Judy Garland and three other women, but was hardly closeted.
Wikipedia supports the idea that Van Gogh cut off his ear after some tension between him and Gauguin, possibly over Gauguin's plan to leave, and after doing so, Vincent reportedly wrapped it in paper and delivered it to a brothel that he and Gauguin frequented. So that's hardly a romantic gift, I'm thinking, unless Van Gogh wanted someone at the brothel to show it to Gauguin. But since Van Gogh was in the middle of a psychotic episode, we may never know the full reason he sliced off his ear - in modern times he might have been diagnosed with body dysmorphic syndrome, or body integrity identity disorder, which is a mental illness where people feel the urge to remove healthy limbs in order to feel more "whole". Some people just think that he cut off PART of his ear as he was attempting to slice his own throat - so was it a suicide attempt?
All that aside, what's genius here is the format of film - they show Van Gogh's finished paintings, full-screen, at key moments, and you really get to see how the events in his life, the places he went, influenced the paintings. A painting made when he lived in The Hague, for example, looks quite different from one made when he lived in Paris, and then the ones made while living in Arles show further development of his style. The only film I can think of that uses a similar motif would be "Amadeus", when that film depicted events in Mozart's life reflected in the staging of his operas.
Another device that the film used was the narration of Vincent's letters to his brother, Theo - but they chose to have read aloud in Theo's voice, and this was a bit confusing. It's true that Vincent wrote many letters to Theo, and this is how we now know so much about his career - and sure, Theo would be reading the letters, and there's a good chance that he read them aloud, but wouldn't it have made more sense to have them read aloud in Vincent's voice? This would follow cinematic convention more closely, and would have been less confusing.
NITPICK POINT: Is his name pronounced "Van Go" or "Van Gock"?? The movie can't keep it straight, and characters say it both ways. Consistency is key, you've got to pick one pronunciation and get all your actors on board with it.
Also starring Kirk Douglas (last seen in "Spartacus"), Anthony Quinn (last seen in "A Walk in the Clouds"), James Donald (last seen in "The Bridge on the River Kwai"), Pamela Brown, Henry Daniell (last seen in "Holiday"), Madge Kennedy, Lionel Jeffries (last seen in "Stage Fright"), with cameos from Henry Corden (last seen in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"), Len Lesser (also carrying over from "Somebody Up There Likes Me"), Marion Ross.
RATING: 6 out of 10 sunflowers
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