Moulin Rouge (Romulus Films; United Artists) is a fictionalized biography of famed French Painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901). The son of a nobleman, Lautrec was crippled in childhood and grew up an ugly, aristocratic dwarf who tried, in cognac and in the brothels and bistros of Paris, to forget the pain in his legs and heart. When he died at 37, after a feverish lifetime that included a sojourn in a madhouse, he left behind him a vivid record of the lower depths of Paris, its harlots and hunted, defeated and disfigured, drawn with artistry, insight and compassion.
Director and Co-Author John (The African Queen) Huston has based his film on Pierre la Mure's bestselling 1950 novel, Moulin Rouge. Like the book, the picture takes some liberties with fact, e.g., by building up a romance between Lautrec and a streetwalker. Unavoidably, the film also softens the more Rabelaisian aspects of Lautrec's life; the fact that he was a star boarder at many of Paris' brothels is barely hinted at. But the picture is nonetheless an exuberant, bizarre, visually striking re-creation of an artist and an era, told, as in Lautrec's own work, without pity or revulsion, vulgarity or pathos.
In a dual role, Jose (Cyrano de Bergerac) Ferrer, 5 ft. 11 in., plays Lautrec's father and, standing on knees in stumpy boots for closeups, 4 ft. 8 in. Artist Lautrec. (A dwarf was used for long shots.) Ferrer's is a startling physical likeness: bloated lips, bulbous nose, bushy beard, pince-nez and bowler. But, although his well-nourished performance touches on Lautrec's wittiness and waspishness, it sometimes seems to miss out on his inner loneliness and agony. The women in Lautrec's life make an exotic gallery: blonde French Dancer Colette Marchand as the rapacious streetwalker who almost drives Lautrec to suicide; Suzanne Flon as the perceptive, understanding model, Myri-ame Hayem; Hollywood's flouncy Zsa Zsa Gabor as man-chasing Singer Jane Avril (in real life, a favorite Lautrec cancan model); Katherine Kath as the tigerish, redheaded dancer Louise Weber.
But the outstanding feature of the film is the exciting atmospheric photography. With LIFE Photographer Eliot Elisofon as special color consultant, Director Huston has dipped imaginatively into the Technicolor palette to capture on film much of the quality of Lautrec's own work. Shot in authentic Parisian settings, the picture features muted blue-green backgrounds splashed with hot pinks, burnt oranges and yellows as Lautrec's lonely little figure hobbles down Montmartre's cobblestone streets, or as the cancan dancers come on in the heat and haze of the Moulin Rouge in a swirl of black silk stockings and white lace petticoats. At its visual best, the picture is a Lautrec painting come to life: it has the nervous, whip-cracking line, the absinthe bite, the very color of corruption of Lautrec's Paris.
Above and Beyond (MGM) dramatizes the atom-bombing of Hiroshima.