Trailer
Plot summary
Vincent van Gogh follows his father into the ministry, but the church authorities judge him unfit. He asks them for any position at all, and they send him to a very poor mining community. There he becomes deeply absorbed in the hardship of the miners and begins sketching their daily life. The religious leaders dislike his approach and object to his care for the poor.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Lust for Life (1956)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- To paint like Vincent van Gogh on camera, Kirk Douglas practiced painting crows, and his wife Anne said he came home from the shoot still in character. Asked later whether he would immerse himself that way again, Douglas said he would not.
- Rather than borrow originals, the production used two hundred enlarged color photographs standing in for Van Gogh's finished canvases, backed up by copies painted for the film by an American art teacher, Robert Parker.
- The film ran for a record 37 weeks at the Plaza Theatre on East 58th Street in New York, taking $450,000 there after opening as a benefit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's student programme.
- Despite the awards, MGM's own records show the film lost money: rentals of $1,595,000 in the United States and Canada and $1,100,000 elsewhere still left a loss of $2,072,000.
