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Matter of vision, started by a little girl's bullet and clinched by a Sudanese rebel's blade. The British soldier with an aesthetic streak (Ronald Colman), turning to art after a battlefield wound. "Painting is seeing, and then remembering it better than you saw it." He bunks with the war correspondent (Walter Huston) in London and launches his career, grows famous, then complacent. (A foot through a stale canvas is his friend's concise criticism.) Reuniting with the childhood sweetheart (Muriel Angelus) means evaluating her own pictures, "oh, there's something grim and Dutch about your work that I like, but..." The pallid maiden's opposite number is the vivid guttersnipe (Ida Lupino), the grudging model for the protagonist's opus in the midst of his encroaching blindness. "May you have visions of heaven," says a colleague, "for in the end, monsieur, you will descend alive into hell." Kipling's first novel is an odd fit for William Wellman, a sort of proto-Albert Lewin contemplation of the artiste's condition bracketed by colonial skirmishes out of Beau Geste. (The active technique makes for a curiously peppy view of melancholia.) The wobbly optical nerve finds plenty of inspiration in Lupino's little Of Human Bondage audition, the Cockney lass is driven to hysteria for the look required by the aesthete, her vengeance turns his chef-d'oeuvre into a smear of turpentine and paint. "The best work you ever saw. I'm drunk and everything's blurred and there's no more hope, but it's good work." Humility comes with a morbid undertow, the rendezvous out in the desert is prefaced by a smiling toast to "your friend, death." Huston has it in the back of his mind in Moulin Rouge, Richardson hurls it into the stew of Laughter in the Dark. With Dudley Digges, Ernest Cossart, Ferike Boros, Pedro de Cordoba, Colin Tapley, and Halliwell Hobbes. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |