After the excruciating experience of the ear-splitting, corny and vulgar "Moulin Rouge" of Baz Luhrmann I thought I would take another peek at John Huston's film of the same name. Apart from being inspired by the same setting, the two films bear no resemblance to one another. Not that the Huston seemed very much of a work in its day but, compared to the recent monstrosity it has some things going for it; Oswald Morris's colour photography for instance; reds, yellows and greens, almost giving the impression of having been filtered through smoke, a wonderful cinematic counterpart to the art of Toulouse-Lautrec. He was to do similar marvelous things to Huston's later "Moby Dick". Nothing quite matches "Moulin Rouge"'s first reel which simply recreates a typical evening of entertainment at the eponymous pleasure house. Thereafter we are in typical Hollywood biopic country where everyone in varying degrees sports a French accent, which often seems to caricature dialogue already banal, such as Lautrec imagining on his deathbed Jane Avril saying, "Henri, my dear, we just heard you were dying. We simply had to say goodbye". Somehow however, as is often the case of the very best of "bad" films, "Moulin Rouge" has a way of sweeping you along with it. It is never boring or less than entertaining. It may lack the intensity of Minnelli's Van Gogh biopic "Lust for Life" but then Jose Ferrer is not quite an actor in the Kirk Douglas class. At two points the narrative is punctuated by montage sequences of Toulouse-Lautrec's art, delightful compilations enhanced by Georges Auric's musicianly score. It is a pity in a way that these minutes of serious cinema throw into sharp relief the almost unbelievable crassness of the sequence where the depressed artist turns on the gas to end it all but then picks up his paintbrush only to have second thoughts. At moments such as this "Moulin Rouge" is almost sublimely bad which is more than can be said of the recent film which is just plain awful.
Review of Moulin Rouge
