There's a certain Russian nesting-doll aspect to movies trying to portray the lives and artistry of painters. What you have is one visual medium, the medium of cinema, trying to recreate the work of people who themselves were using a different visual medium to recreate the world they saw around them. Movies that want to truly capture the spirit of a painter have to, in a sense, reinvent the world he or she saw. No movie illustrates the trials and the triumphs of that artistic process better than Vincente Minnelli's 1956 biopic Lust for Life.

The standard Hollywood narrative for stories about artists is that of the tortured genius, a man doomed to tragedy and lost love, tearing himself apart for the sake of art. In the case of someone like Vincent van Gogh, whose life has practically becomes synonymous with our ideas of genius and madness, the story comes to the screen already gift-wrapped. But what makes Minnelli's film so entertaining, even in moments where it checks off those familiar story beats of failure, love, and thwarted triumph, is that it captures the joy of artistic work. Instead of coming off as a man whose artistic genius drives him to madness, the van Gogh of Minnelli's film is portrayed as someone who arrived at genius only after lots of obsessive hard work, someone who comes alive when he's talking about painting. If anything, the work he puts into painting is what staves off his mental illness.

Lust for Life begins with the story of Vincent van Gogh (Kirk Douglas), a troubled young man who writes wretchedly boring sermons and struggles to help the poor people of a coal mining town. His efforts only succeed in ruining his own health. From there, he goes on to one frustrated infatuation after another; first with his widowed and thoroughly repulsed cousin (Jeanette Sterke), and then with a cynical prostitute (Pamela Brown). It’s only when he throws himself into art that he finally finds an outlet for his passions. It's a challenge that brings him both joy and agony. Thanks to the help of his devoted older brother Theo (James Donald), an art dealer with connections, he meets successful artists of the day, including Paul Gauguin (Anthony Quinn). But after his friendship with Gaugin falls apart, van Gogh's ever-present mental problems start to take over, forcing him into a battle that he will, inevitably, one day lose.

Kirk Douglas' portrayal of van Gogh earned him an Oscar nomination, but it's a performance that's earned him mixed reviews over the past several decades. It all seems to depend on whether the thought of Kirk Douglas going full-throttle into the part of a tormented genius thrills you or sends a shiver of dread down your spine. Critic Dave Kehr thought the role was perfectly suited to Douglas' brand of 'knotty, passionate self-destructiveness' while Nathan Rabin called it 'increasingly egregious overacting' that 'brings out the worst in Douglas.' For my own part, I feel it's about as close a match of character and actor as you could wish for in a biopic. Douglas is an actor whose febrile intensity can be electrifying or exhausting. While he's capable of far more subtlety and humor than he's often given credit for (check his great performance in A Letter to Three Wives), so many of his performances have the feel of a car that's about to drive off the cliff, but when you're playing Vincent van Gogh, that's exactly what you want.

The madness and neediness of van Gogh sets something loose in Douglas; he's been this unhinged before but never this vulnerable and yearning. My personal favorite moment is when van Gogh is telling the news of his brother's engagement to a friend. Douglas speaks slowly at first, talking himself into genuine happiness over the news. But then he says, 'My father always wanted one of us to--' and at that, he stops. Douglas holds the pause long enough to let us see the desperate pain of this man, who feels what a burden he is, and hates it.

The counterpart to Douglas' hungry van Gogh is Anthony Quinn's sleekly satisfied Paul Gauguin, an artist whose hot-blooded approach to life is tempered by a cool head. Quinn earned the Oscar that eluded Douglas, as Supporting Actor. It's one of those performances that win, not necessarily because they're the deepest or most thoughtful in the year's line-up, but because they inject so much energy into the film. From the moment Quinn strides into the movie, swirling his cape, sneering at his artistic rivals and brandishing his walking stick at any painting that happens to catch his fancy, he brings a sense of fresh air and vitality with him. Without his presence, Van Gogh's unrelenting pain would have the audience clawing at the walls before two hours were up. We want him to stick around almost as much as van Gogh does.


The scene where Gauguin comes to live with van Gogh, lured more by the promise of room and board than by his fellow artist's company, is perfectly played by Quinn. Van Gogh is ecstatic, dragging his friend to see how carefully he's prepared a room for him, filled with paintings. He's like a shipwrecked victim who's spotted another survivor. Gauguin, who makes it clear how much he detests affection and close ties, is both repelled and touched by the attention. Quinn, who's been so imperious and confident up until this moment, visibly shrinks before Douglas, as if realizing for the first time what he's gotten himself into. The whole tragic ending of the van Gogh and Gauguin friendship is foretold in that scene.

Good as the performances are though, it's impossible to watch this movie and not come to the conclusion that it's the visual possibilities that most excited the director, Vincente Minnelli. Minnelli was always a director who loved to celebrate the beauty of art and objects. Sometimes the protagonists of his films are artists themselves, as in An American in Paris or The Bad and the Beautiful. Other times, they're merely passengers in beautiful worlds, as in Meet Me in St. Louis or Gigi.

Lust for Life, while still as beautiful as his early films, sets itself apart from them with a visual style that's moodier and more somber than the plush rose-tinted surfaces of Meet Me in St. Louis. At times, van Gogh's prickly red beard is the main source of color in the frame as Minnelli's camera follows him through crowds of busy laborers and endless wheat fields. Minnelli's style constantly forces the viewer's eye back to the paintings. Hegoes to great lengths to recreate the visions that van Gogh saw, right down to the twisted trees and wrinkled faces populating his world.

The ambition of Minnelli and his team created several challenges. At the time, Minnelli's home studio, MGM, used Eastman Color for its color films, which resulted, according to Minnelli, in 'colors straight from the candy box, a brilliant mixture of blues, reds, and yellows that resembled neither life nor art.' Minnelli insisted on reviving the neglected Ansco color process to create subtler, richer tones. The studio had to buy up the last remaining Ansco stock and build a special lab to process it. The filmmaking team also struggled with the problem of filming Van Gogh's actual paintings, as harsh movie camera light could have had a disastrous effect. They had to use special cameras and send them into the homes of private collectors, getting shots that had to be backlit and refilmed in the studio.

The danger with a film like Lust for Life is to see it only as a hollow cliche of the mad artist, or as a movie that cares more about its visuals than its plot or characters. The visuals and the characters breathe together; we see a world on film that comes as close to looking like a van Gogh painting as any other place could. And that's kind of the point. Look deeper inside this Russian nesting doll of a film and you find the artist staring into a world that stares all kinds of beauty back at him.

Aubyn Eli blogs about color movies-and a whole of black-and-white ones-at The Girl with the White Parasol.