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The monstrous ambivalence of genius, "it is not our purpose to defend him." The London stockbroker (George Sanders) in his bourgeois element seems rather "commonplace" to the author (Herbert Marshall), he ditches home and family for the creative urge and suddenly his life exerts "the fascination of a detective story." Paris receives the late bloomer, sidewalk cafés and filthy attics are his realm, pride and indifference form his armor. (Asked about his need to paint, he elucidates it as a matter of a swimmer not drowning.) Beauty is "a wonderful and strange thing that the artist creates out of chaos, in torment," raves the admiring pushover (Steven Geray), said artist replies by helping himself to his wife (Doris Dudley) and shrugging after the discarded woman gulps poison. "I needed practice in painting the female figure." W. Somerset Maugham on Gauguin is the ideal starting point for Albert Lewin's cultivated private worlds, a study of the cruel sublime refined with each subsequent film. The "most unmitigated cad" knows his work will only sell after his death, cf. Becker's Montparnasse 19, his move to Tahiti is worked out in Reed's Outcast of the Islands. Marriage is split between the acerbity of the henpecked tippler (Eric Blore) and the fondness of the matchmaking bawd (Florence Bates), the local doctor (Albert Bassermann) diagnoses leprosy and the native bride (Elena Verdugo) keeps her promise with tears and fire. Elusiveness of expression is its own comeuppance, all things told, it builds to a Technicolor glimpse of the wall of canvases in a rotting hut. "It was as if I were present at the beginning of the world." A key work for Russell, Mahler and Savage Messiah especially. With Molly Lamont, Irene Tedrow, and Robert Greig. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |