Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Matylda Swan It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Leofwine_draca MOULIN ROUGE is an engaging and well-realised biopic of the French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, directed by John Huston with skill and panache. It's a somewhat slow-moving mood piece that aims to depict a slice of life at tail of the 19th century in vivid and vibrant Paris, and it does that in spades.Tall actor Jose Ferrer plays the main role. Toulouse-Lautrec was a short guy in real life, so special effects are called into play to make Ferrer seem short. Sometimes he's doubled, sometimes he walks on his knees. It's a physical transformation worthy of the great Lon Chaney and Ferrer shines in the part, bringing the tortured artist soul to life in a believable way.The rest of the film can be slow in paces but there's always something visually interesting taking place to keep it moving. The cast is full of larger than life figures, none more so than Zsa Zsa Gabor as a flamboyant dancer. The scenes at the Moulin Rouge are particularly well-staged aside from the guy with the distracting fake nose and chin, but then he's used to tie in to the artist's famous silhouette. A regular run of familiar faces including Eric Pohlmann, Michael Balfour, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee helps to retain the interest, and the ending is suitably sombre.

harvbenn True fact: When Moulin Rouge came out in 1952, it reached heights of popularity not seen since Gone With the Wind. Even if you're not all weepy about the Old South, you gotta admit, well, it's Gone With the Wind. Compared with that, how on earth did this unwitty, wooden dialog, character-less, false french-accented, set-piece art history lesson become so popular, even getting nominations? Well it was 1952, the abysmal nadir of fear and repression in America. We feared anything different, and sex was verboten. Toulouse-Lautrec was different enough. In one of the film's few moments in which John Huston actually produces some directional art, Toulouse gets up from his cafe table and ... he was already up. His legs are short. As for the sex, there's many women roles, all of them prostitutes. Result: a 1952 smash. To be fair, there's a story woven in: deformed aristocrat falls in love with unintelligent, untalented, unappreciative prostitute, and she breaks his heart for life. Completely unconvincing and doesn't fit anything else in the story. And if you look it up, it appears "Marie Charlet" either never existed, or if she did, she was just one of Toulouse's many prostitute friends. Character development, plot interest, dramatic tension, credible situations, dialog, who needs any of that in 1952, when Jose Ferrer is a wealthy alcoholic freak going out with a pretty prostitute? Unsuccessful as a story with characters, the film nevertheless contains achievements that are formidable. First, the Moulin Rouge, a night club in 1890s Paris, is portrayed in detail, faithfully to reviews of the time and to our very best source: Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings. Moulin Rouge was a nightly exorbitant over-the-top party of drinking, prostitute hookups, and floor shows such as Paris had never seen. In particular, the show included that dance, the can-can, done in their own outrageous style. Which brings us to the second achievement of this film: the choreography. We know how can-can looked at Moulin Rouge, from Toulouse's paintings; and there are reviews of what it sounded like: the girls shrieked loud and joyous as they did their stunts. William Chapell, credited only as "Dance Director," did fine choreography in this film. The point of the dance was to show the girls' legs and flash their white lace bloomered crotches, as wide, as long, and as often, and in as many angles, spins, jumps, and tumbles as the human body permitted. It's all here and it is wonderful.The last real achievement of this film, and it is huge, is the art. Paul Sheriff won the 1952 Oscar for art direction of this film. Without knowing the competition, I'll agree it was deserved. The sets are composed from Toulouse's paintings. Toulouse's actual works, which were often sketched at his cafe table, are composed in the movie, which shows us Toulouse creating the works. And what works they are. For some reason I had never really looked at Toulouse's paintings. I didn't take them seriously I suppose, because of the subject matter and because some are poster art and they are not, you know, Manet or Cezanne or Van Gogh. Well I got what a snob deserves because I missed years of loving the wry, sensitive, brooding, and gorgeously drawn and splendidly colored art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

LaDonna Keskes Huston must have been Technicolor-blinded: the film is awash in garish hues, about the only thing to recommend it. Seen the dancing girls once, you've seen them jump and yelp six or seven times. Dull script (well, Huston didn't have Dashiell Hammett as his foundation), with a flashback sequence that seems slightly ridiculous, with José Ferrer playing Lautrec AND Lautrec's father (see the virtuosity!), leaden pacing, not a single clever line. Lautrec comes across as a bearded brat, pettish and spoiled. The flash-cut sequences showing Lautrec's paintings are jumpy and amateurish and poorly timed--it's hard to believe this is the creator of The Maltese Falcon, Beat The Devil, and Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Painter loses girl, painter loses girl, painter loses girl. Nobody loves him or appreciates him, then he dies. Zsa Zsa Gabor lip-synchs bad songs badly and offers nothing as an actress except a reminder that the era required several Marilyn Monroe facsimiles. I had a difficult time staying awake, and by the time Lautrec finally closed his eyes I had long since done so myself.

Steffi_P With the proficiency of filmmakers with Technicolor getting ever greater, there was a series of features in the 1950s about painting which mimicked a painterly look through their cinematography and composition. This biopic of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec achieves some of the best results to that end, not surprisingly as it is the result of a collaboration between director John Huston, himself a painter, and noted "specialist" cinematographer Oswald Morris, who went on to win an Oscar for his work here.The opening twenty minutes of Moulin Rouge is absolutely stunning. We open with a lengthy dance sequence at the eponymous club, a highly stylised and rhythmic scene almost like something out of a musical. Huston and Morris' aim here was to create something that looked like a Lautrec painting come to life. The light is misty, the backgrounds an indistinct blur while the foreground is dominated by bold splashes of colour. The result is absolutely captivating, embodying the atmosphere of fin-de-siecle Paris and Lautrec's world with dreamy nostalgia.Sadly, the film never gets back to these dizzy heights. The image and tone – that painting-come-to-life factor – is often good but never quite so great as at the beginning. Later on there is a very choppy montage of Lautrec's paintings, which doesn't really show his work off to the best effect. Another big problems I think is that, while Huston could compose a great shot, he was not the best director of actors. Jose Ferrer had a lot of talent but he often seems wooden here. Some of the smaller performances are just a little too melodramatic, and others are too dull. I also think it was a mistake casting Ferrer as his father as well. In the scene where Lautrec senior confronts his son in Paris, I can imagine that Huston would have wanted to keep them in separate shots anyway to emphasise the lack of warmth between them, but as it is it looks too obvious and artificial.Story-wise, this is a pretty good attempt at showing a three-dimensional view of a life story. Behind the vivid, dynamic paintings Moulin Rouge reveals an insecure, self-deprecating artist, utterly assured of his own talent but thinking himself worthless in every other respect. It's a wholly miserable tale which is really quite suited to John Huston, who spent most of this period making film-noirs. It's also perhaps Huston's most personal film, as apparently at one point he planned to make a documentary on French painters.Comparisons are inevitable between Moulin Rouge and Lust for Life, Vincente Minnelli's 1956 biopic of Vincent van Gogh. Both recreate the style of their subject through cinematography and colour composition, and both were made by directors who were also painters. It's interesting though that while both Lautrec and Van Gogh were depressive individuals who lead pretty tragic lives, Moulin Rouge is overall pessimistic in tone, whereas Lust for Life leaves you feeling uplifted and positive. The difference is that Huston was perhaps one of the most cynical directors ever, while Minnelli was much more the romantic.Huston was a master at showing us grimness and despair, but not so great at poignancy, which is why Moulin Rouge will leave you feeling down but is unlikely to bring on tears. However, visually this is Huston's most beautiful picture and strangely it is this which gives Moulin Rouge a bittersweet tinge. This is one case where style over substance really pays off. Moulin Rouge has lots of little flaws but as a whole it is often enthralling and certainly memorable.