Born into aristocracy, Toulouse-Lautrec moves to Paris to pursue his art as he hangs out at the Moulin Rouge where he feels like he fits in being a misfit among other misfits. Yet, because of the deformity of his legs from an accident, he believes he is never destined to experience the true love of a woman. But that lack of love in his life may change as he meets two women
José Ferrer Zsa Zsa Gabor Suzanne Flon Claude Nollier Katherine Kath Muriel Smith Mary Clare Walter Crisham Harold Kasket Jim Gérald Georges Lannes Lee Montague Maureen Swanson Tutte Lemkow Jill Bennett Theodore Bikel Peter Cushing Charles Carson Walter Cross Colette Marchand Diane Cilento Christopher Lee Michael Balfour Francis de Wolff Tim Turner
물랑 루즈, Мулен Руж, Μουλέν Ρουζ, מולין רוז', 红磨坊, Målaren på Moulin Rouge
USANR
Germany12
Denmark
Austria12
Hungary16
Netherlands6
Germany12
Austria
Denmark
Germany
Hungary
Netherlands
USA
“Moulin Rouge” has all the style of a coupe glass of absinthe being sipped by a man wearing a top hat and tails.
Its structure, though, is as dizzy and messy as the walk home after all that absinthe sipping has come to an end.
Director John Huston’s biopic is more of a fic-optic account of impressionist artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The paintings and names of the era will seem familiar, but the story around them is a myth woven by Huston for aesthetic effect.
Unfortunately, it’s a myth hardly worth telling.
Like the paintings of the central subject, Huston’s images are vivid enough on their own, so that the narrative elements have all the import of a plastic informational…
"I am a painter of the streets and of the gutter."
Aside from whatever inherent value there is in seeing a thirteenth John Huston film (that Criterion Channel happens to be dumping at month's end), I was especially motivated to watch Moulin Rouge because of its considerable impact on Bob Fosse as noted by biographer Sam Wasson. Perhaps for the sake of concision, Wasson reflects that Huston's film was "one of Fosse's favorite movie musicals" and cites the fractured editing of the cancan sequences as a formative influence, but apart from that he declines to synopsize the film. I wish he'd chosen otherwise, if only so I could have prepared myself for flaccid biopic vibes when I was anticipating a…
I’m going to dispel any confusion straightaway and state it is utter false advertisement to title this movie Moulin Rouge, when the bulk of the film takes place in the dank, desolate apartment of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and not at the titular Parisian cabaret. Perfidiously presenting itself as a musical extravaganza of the famed birthplace of French cancan, John Huston instead presents a bowdlerized biopic of Lautrec—an invented history punctuated with formulaic romantic subplots, maudlin flourishes and melodramatic flashbacks.
It’s unfortunate that only a few scenes take place in the Moulin Rouge, because that’s when the film is at its zestiest. Historically-accurate costume designs by Marcel Vertès were based off Lautrec’s posters of the Moulin Rouge and its dancers (namely…
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was one of the great painters of movement. His lines are so energetic and his colors so vivid that his works seem to pop off their canvases at you. At times, his art even anticipates the medium of film. Focalizing viewers’ attention on one visual plane by rendering the others blurry and abstract is not unlike focusing a camera lens. It’s not surprising that a director might want to make a film about him and his milieu. The only surprise is that that director was John Huston. To be clear, I like Huston’s filmography a lot. I just tend to think of him as a great adaptor of literature rather than as a visual stylist. On paper,…
How am I supposed to know that we're in 19th century Paris without the Madonna and Nirvana songs?
"What should we adopt as the symbol of such a place, the beacon of revolutionaries, artists, bohemians, and lovers in this, the gilded age of the world's most beautiful city?"
"Big red windmill sounds good."
Fans of Baz Luhrmann's bopping jukebox musical of the same name will find none of the same style of grandeur or excitement in this John Huston period drama. The film is a sort-of biopic of the French artist Toulouse Lautrec, whose frilly dancing girls helped to shape the liberated, lustful image of Paris in the Belle Époque. Toulouse (José Ferrer) was particularly short as the result of a childhood injury, and his physical stature was dramatized here to show the man as an embittered outcast…
100 Films by 18 Directors: John Huston
While a gorgeous technicolor explosion of color, John Huston's Moulin Rouge simply does not really click. It touches on some similar Huston themes regarding human nature - namely primal instincts, birth circumstances, and self-loathing - though it never really dives into its characters that are under its lens. Instead, its portrayal of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (Jose Ferrer) sort of skims through his life at the Moulin Rouge, his loves, and his alcoholism that eventually killed him. In particular, the romantic elements really falter and given their significance in the story, it was essential to get those portions right. No matter how beautiful Moulin Rouge may be, it simply never really sings and performs the…
“The censors of the early fifties wouldn't have allowed Toulouse-Lautrec’s real life to be made into a picture.” — John Huston
Huston finds away around the common problem of artist and writer biopics — watching artists slowly create something. In the opening cabaret scene we see Lautrec slugging cognac and sketching on a tablecloth (actually the the hand of a noted ex-forger gone legit) while all about him swirl the flying legs and frilly pantaloons of the leggy can-can dancers, all rendered using an original Technicolor process bringing Lautrec’s vivid lithograph posters to life. “I was going to try to use color on the screen as Lautrec had used it in his paintings,” Huston said, “Our idea was to flatten…
The title is a bit misleading. This isn't a movie about the turn-of-the-(20th)-century Parisian nightspot, but rather the artist who made it famous. For a significant stretch it's preoccupied with Henri de Toulouse-Latrec's passionate love affair with a tragic woman of the streets, which is fairly compelling, only to return to more pedestrian matters. Anyone with a significant disability has every right in the world to wallow in self-pity, but when a movie does so, well, it's tiresome.
I understand the film's need to have a full-sized movie star (Jose Ferrer) playing a half-sized man, but director John Huston's constant exertions to render this believable -- and often it's not -- constantly took me out of the picture. The most…
When you think of a title like "Moulin Rouge", you would be expecting something like Jean Renoir's "French Cancan", a film about the beginning of the french cancan in the Moulin Rouge. In fact, John Huston's "Moulin Rouge" is not about the Moulin Rouge establishment but rather one of its most proeminent costumers, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a man whose condition gave name to pycnodysostosis, the Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome. At first, I found it so weird the way José Ferrer was characterized but seeing pictures of the real Toulouse-Lautrec was striking as they had done such a good job to recreate what he looked like.
It has that classical film feel. It looks wonderful with the vibrant colours and theatrical acting. It's a Hollywood biopic with emphasis on the values and the drama, and I was absolutely ok with that. I think the way John Huston does it simply works well.
I have an extremely vague recollection from my childhood of having seen Jose Ferrer's portrayal of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in this, toddling around awkwardly with shoes on his knees and his legs bound up behind him, but it's more likely that I'm just remembering one of the many parodies of his performance that seemed to pop up frequently on sketch comedy shows back in the day...and make no mistake, his stumpy-legged appearance in this is ripe for mockery, no matter how well-intentioned it was. Once seen, it cannot be unseen...at least not without stifling inappropriate laughter.
The plot is a bit of a drag, consisting of Lautrec drinking to excess, sketching on tablecloths, getting into shouting matches with his abusive…
I sometimes watch this for the technicolor alone. The unbelievably bleak and tragic story always kill me. The ending lifts me up though! The inspired and inventive vibe sprinkled throughout this movie (first 15 mins, end shot, long lens singles, etc) make you think about it fondly long after it’s over. One of Huston’s best.
