When I think of classic Hollywood adventure films, at least the ones that involve tough, masculine heroes fighting off danger with little more than luck and nerve, three directors come instantly to mind: John Ford, Howard Hawks and John Huston. Their movies were overwhelmingly populated with male characters struggling to find some measure of loyalty and honor in a chaotic world. But while Ford’s world was essentially a patriarchal one of fathers and leaders passing along hard-earned wisdom to younger men and Hawks’ vision favored stoic humor and a spirit of camaraderie, Huston stands out as the most difficult to pin down. Out of the three, he was the most deliberately rough and rowdy, a man who purposefully cast himself in the mold of Hemingway-style adventurer.

Yet his films are the most ambivalent about their heroes; while Huston never seemed to lose his relish for putting his characters (not to mention his actors) into hair-raising situations, his movies often leave it as a toss-up whether the whole thing was really worth it or not.

Looking at Huston’s work as a whole, it’s pretty difficult to find a place for his 1952 Oscar-nominated biopic of painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge. At the time, Moulin Rouge was widely praised for Huston’s use of color and imagery; its performances and design earned it a total of seven nominations. And yet, it’s since receded from public attention, giving way to more iconic Huston titles like The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Key Largo.

Moulin Rouge does have some thematic similarities to these other films. The protagonist is a man with high ambitions and little optimism for the world around him. He has dreams that never coalesce into reality. He’s sharp and casually insulting to people around him. And, like so many other Huston films, the story offered grueling physical challenges for the actor involved, as the lead, Jose Ferrer, had to walk on his knees with his lower legs strapped to his body in order to portray Lautrec’s physical condition. However, it stands out dramatically from Huston’s other works in one crucial way: for once, the writer-director seems far more interested in crafting brilliantly colored visuals than in telling a dialogue-driven story. In Moulin Rouge, he sets out to use the art of Technicolor to bring back the cancan dancers and barflies that once entranced the great Parisian painter.

Huston’s introductory scene to the Moulin Rouge is a master class in establishing scene, atmosphere and characters in one vivid stroke. It begins with a series of rapid pans across the stage of the theater, the camera restlessly following the movements of the performers, circling and rising and falling back until you get dizzy just watching it. We see two brilliantly costumed dancers sniping at each other during the middle of their own number. Their long-chinned partner keeps them moving and the dance continues on. Suddenly a small hand comes into view, sketching away. The color photography and the vivid costumes are bright enough that it’s almost jarring to see the very same scene we just witnessed reduced down to a few dark lines on someone’s sketchpad. The roving camera moves on again, we get to eavesdrop on a few conversations, and then we’re back to the artist, now revealed as a thin, bearded man, furiously tossing back cognac as he sketches away.

The scene travels on through all the famous personalities of Toulouse-Lautrec’s artwork: the star entertainer Jane Avril (Zsa Zsa Gabor), the high-kicking La Goulue (Katherine Kath), and a male dancer that looks exactly like his picture of “La Chocolat.” All the while, Huston barely gives the camera time to pause. But finally, after the two squabbling dancers have broken into a full-on, hair-pulling (and biting) fight and the performance has broken up for the night, we see Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec rise from his chair. We see his shortened legs for the first time as the man slowly walks home, alone and silent. It’s a perfect introductory sequence that succeeds in giving us what very few biopics ever manage: a glimpse at the world through the artist’s eyes.

By all accounts, John Huston immersed himself in the artistic challenge of bringing Lautrec’s paintings to life on the screen. He firmly instructed his team that the Technicolor for the film would not be the bold, larger-than-life colors typical for the medium. Instead, they would do their best to recreate the exact colors of Lautrec’s artwork. Huston told cinematographer Oswald Morris to make the film look as if Lautrec himself had directed it. Morris took to the task with ingenuity, using light-scattering filters on the camera and filming each set full of smoke so that the actors would pop out from the background. He also used individualized color lights for each main character, assigning a blue-green filter to Lautrec, a pink light for the woman he loves, and so on. At the time, according to Morris, “the Technicolor people hated it.” They didn’t approve of their technology being monkeyed around with. However, they would change their minds when the film was released and rewarded with effusive praise for its techniques.

The flip side to Huston’s interest in recapturing the spirit of Lautrec’s work onscreen is that he was working with a script that frustratingly gives us only small glimpses into the artistic thought process behind his work. Instead, the movie focuses on one aspect of Lautrec’s life to the exclusion of all else: his deep, unrequited desire for love.

idea that behind every great artist lies a great love lost or thwarted is one of those strange, reductive notions that will probably never die so long as Hollywood keeps making biopics. Moulin Rouge recasts Toulouse-Lautrec as a spurned romantic, a man secretly longing for love, but so accustomed to rejection that he can’t imagine anything else. First we see him as a young man, ardently proclaiming his love to a childhood friend of his own social class, only for her to reject him, telling him that no woman could ever love a hideous dwarf.

Years later, the adult Lautrec is a cynical alcoholic, shielding himself from heartache with sarcastic quips and finding joy only through his art. It isn’t until he meets Marie Charlet (Colette Marchand), a common-as-dirt streetwalker, that he finally finds a woman willing to overlook his shortened legs. Marie poses for him and fawns over him and for a brief time, he allows himself to be in love. But his romance with Marie is doomed by her greedy, callow nature.

The film allows us a brief sojourn from unrequited love as we watch Lautrec perfect his posters and scandalize Paris with his work. The sequence of Lautrec figuring out new techniques and new colors is one of the few times Moulin Rouge ever approaches the actual mechanics of his art and it’s one of the more interesting parts of the film. But before long, the plot once again returns to love; Lautrec meets a woman named Myriamme (Suzanne Flon) who is everything Marie was not: cultured, principled, and elegant. She adores his company and loves his art. Yet even after he’s found the ideal woman, Lautrec cannot believe anybody could want him and sarcastically shoots down all of Myriamme’s attempts to reach out.

When he finally realizes he’s found love, it’s after he’s wasted all his chances with her, leaving him a broken wreck, reading her last letter over and over. By spending so much time on Lautrec’s personal life (and a heavily fictionalized one at that), the film essentially makes the case that the man’s early death was a great loss, not so much because of all the paintings he never got to make, but because he never found true love. It’s hard not to watch this film and think of the real Lautrec, the one who frequented brothels and referred to the former king of Serbia as a vulgar pig farmer, sneering at such sentimentality.

However, Moulin Rouge has enough strength and sensitivity to find the right grace notes for the finale. After Lautrec has succumbed to illness and alcoholism, we see him at last on his deathbed. And in his final moments, all of his beloved memories of the Moulin Rouge come back to him. He gets to see the transparent figures of his friends dancing for him one last time. Zsa Zsa Gabor, playing Jane Avril, gets perhaps the most heartfelt and tender line reading of her career, whispering in his ear, “Henri, my dear, we just heard you were dying, we simply had to say goodbye.” She floats away from him, back to the dancers. They finish their kicks and wave their handkerchiefs to him in farewell. In its final few reels, the film comes to the conclusion that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec did have true love in his life after all. He loved his work and the people he painted. For Toulouse-Lautrec and for the rowdy, cynical director who brought his story to the screen, that’s as wild an adventure and as tender a romance as anyone could ever have.

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