Reeling Backward: "The Agony and the Ectstasy" (1965)

Charlton Heston and Rex Harrison were both booming screen presences with a decided tendency toward hamminess. They knew the taste of the scenery, and enjoyed it.

But I think both actors deliver some of their best work in "The Agony and the Ecstasy" -- a measure of restraint and disappearance into the character, as opposed to bursting out of the box as was their wont. Neither received Oscar nomination, and indeed the film in general was rather ignored during the awards season, receiving five nods from the Academy in only "technical" categories, winning none.

This, in a weaker year for film, with "The Sound of Music" winning Best Picture -- a film I've still not been able to bring myself to watch all the way through -- and the overwrought "Doctor Zhivago" and the overrated "Ship of Fools" forming its main competition.

I would put "The Agony and the Ecstasy" above them all.

It's a very good, borderline great film that takes a historical subject and muses upon the two men who made it happen: Michelangelo and Pope Julius II (played by Heston and Harrison, respectively). It falls into the category of what we now would call "historical fiction," based upon the book by Irving Stone. The story is part history, part mythology and part dramaturgy.

History is full of ironic inconsistencies. Like the Fourth Crusade, which departed to free Jerusalem from the Muslim horde but instead sacked the allied city of Constantinople. Or Joseph Cinqué, one of the slaves who fought for freedom aboard the ship Amistad later (by some accounts) becoming a slave trader himself.

Chief among fate's little jokes is that Michelangelo is probably best known for his painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, when in fact he labored nearly all of his life as a sculptor. The Pope insisted upon the greatest living artist decorating his chapel, despite Michelangelo's objections. This is the story of their clashing, from which emerged one of the enduring works of mankind.

Julius was known as the warrior-pope who fought many battles to keep the papal lands under Rome's control, rather than being gobbled up by the French and others. The movie depicts him literally sword in hand, wearing ornate plate armor and striking down his enemies in bloody splashes of violence. Harrison plays him as a vainglorious man given to fits of anger, but one who truly believes his mission in life is to exalt God and raise up his church.

The movie takes a little while to get really rolling. Michelangelo is working on the pope's tomb -- 40 statues, all told -- and clashing with Bramante (Harry Andrews), the pope's stiff-necked and territorial architect. Julius decides that his chapel needs some saints on the ceiling, and more or less forces the artist to do his bidding, at cut-rate wages.

There's a nice little speech that Raphael (Tomas Milian), another great artist of that age, gives about two-thirds of the way through in which he nicely describes the economics of artistry in the early 1500s. We're whores, he says, dependent on the wealthy and powerful to provide the funding to do what we are compelled to do.

Michelangelo certainly lives out this description on the film, repeatedly defying Julius only to eventually bend the knee and kiss the ring (quite literally).

His first rebellion is to start the portraits of saints, only to scrape them off the wall or ruin them with buckets of paint in a drunken fit after deciding "the wine is sour," meaning he has no creative will to do anything inspiring. After hiding out as a marble quarryman, he's struck by a vision to do a grand collection of frescoes depicting most of the pivotal acts of the Old Testament, centered by God's creation of Adam.

The image of a bearded old man reaching his hand out to Adam's is surely one of the most enduring images in the public consciousness.

Weeks become months, months become years. "When will you make an end?!?" Julius repeatedly shouts up to Michelangelo, high above the floor of the chapel on his scaffolding. "When I am finished!" the artist replies, equally thunderous. Michelangelo quits, is fired, gives up, but always returns to the task.

The film really gains steam in the third act, where first Michelangelo and then Julius are struck down by ill health -- exhaustion for the painter, war wounds for the pope. Each man is forcefully made aware of his mortality, and finds himself reaching out to the other for understanding. The dynamic of begrudged servant and domineering master slowly evolves into a pairing of mutual respect.

Director Carol Reed helmed a lot of "prestige" projects like this; he's probably best known for "The Third Man" and his Oscar-winning direction of "Oliver!". Screenwriter Philip Dunne ("How Green Was My Valley") turns in a fairly conventional but well-done piece in the "Great Man" tradition of moviemaking.

Diane Cilento has a fairly forgettable role as a matron of the Medici family, the powerful clan that controlled his hometown of Florence and first sponsored his artistry. The idea, a predictable one, is that the pair loved each other in their youth, but he chose sculpting as his expression of ardor, and she married another. Indeed, Michelangelo gives a speech in which it's made clear he essentially lives a monastic existence without sex.

Honestly, it's just an example of a very Y-chromosome movie in which the studio decided to inject a little feminine flavor.

Quibbles aside, though, I enjoyed "The Agony and the Ecstasy" a lot more than I thought it would. It's an exploration of how men accomplish great things, usually by sacrificing some large part of their personal happiness to rededicate to a noble endeavor.

Reeling Backward: "Lust for Life"

One of the greatest piece of hooey ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public was the insistence that great artists are only made through great suffering.

Of course, when you consider that this claim is most vehemently championed by artists themselves, one realizes several things. First, that this precept has been employed over the years to justify any number of instances of damaging behavior in the name of art. Second, that it was often those around the artist who suffered even more than he did.

Lastly, it creates a bias to see the only legitimate art as that which casts a mournful attitude toward the human condition. After all, if all those great artists suffered horribly, they wouldn't be creating paintings and art works of joy and sunshine, would they?

"Lust for Life," the 1956 biopic on Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, is an enthusiastic adherent to this philosophy. Based on a historical novel by Irving Stone and directed by Vincente Minnelli -- who was best known for film musicals like "The Band Wagon" and "An American in Paris" -- the drama is a full-bore leap into the troubled life of the great artist.

Kirk Douglas, who was a prototypical Hollywood lantern-jawed hero type, gives a vibrant and unexpected performance as Van Gogh, portraying him as a mass of fears and obsessions. The painter seems not to possess an ounce of regard for anyone but himself, even pursuing marriage with an older cousin who labels his persistence "disgusting."

I liked the movie well enough, and the cinematography (by Freddie Young and Russell Harlan) of the landscapes and people who inspired Van Gogh is wonderful. I must confess that the continued wallowing in his misery got to be a bit tedious at times.

The central relationships in the film are between Vincent and his brother Theo (James Donald), an art dealer who supported him, and with Paul Gauguin, a French painter played by Anthony Quinn. Quinn won the Oscar for best supporting actor for his performance, despite a rather limited screen time.

The two are an interesting contrast. Gauguin declares that he wants no one to love him, because attachments distract from his painting. Van Gogh is the epitome of neediness, on the other hand. The sequence where they briefly share a house in the south of France is essentially one argument after another, until the showdown where Van Gogh cuts off his own ear.

Minnelli is sly to the point of squeamishness about portraying this infamous bit of Van Gogh lore. Douglas is shot almost entirely from his right side for the remainder of the film, although it appears they used some sort of make-up to portray the damaged ear. He also does not include anything about Van Gogh giving the severed ear to a prostitute, which is the gruesome detail that made the injury memorable in the first place.

Interestingly, some recent examinations of the circumstances of Van Gogh's injury have concluded that it was not self-inflicted. Gauguin was an expert swordsman, and -- consistent with Quinn's portrayal -- was quite a hothead. It seems likely, or at least possible, that Gauguin cut off the ear during a quarrel, and they concocted the story about Van Gogh slicing it off with a razor to save him from prosecution.

Since the screenplay (by Norman Corwin, also nominated for an Oscar) was based on a work of fiction about Van Gogh, it's hard to say how much the film reflects the real artist. Douglas, in a reddish-tinged crewcut and beard, certainly bears an astonishing resemblance to the painter's many self-portraits. But the film often seems more interested in his misery than his ingenuity.

Finally, I'd like to comment on the film's title. "Lust for Life" seems an almost comically incongruous name to describe the life of a man that was essentially a litany of failure, poverty, loneliness and poor health.

It's interesting that most people who encountered Vincent Van Gogh during his lifetime regarded him as strange or even dangerous -- they called him the "red madman" in the neighborhood around the Yellow House where he and Gauguin lived. I think if he lived today, he probably would have spent much of his life institutionalized, or munching on a regimen of mind-altering prescription drugs.

Which isn't to say that Van Gogh wasn't a great artist. It's just that people, and movies, that try to conflate artistry with suffering are generally misguided. It's a paint-by-numbers mentality.

3 stars