Word: sensualist
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They meet again nearly two decades later amid the summer languors of the Riviera. Life has been rough. The adult Anthony is now a "writer, artist, translator, hack; gambler, sensualist, fool," and more importantly, has become an "onlooker at his own ruin." Cursed with a slim annuity adequate for subsistence but not for pleasure, he has slowly lowered himself into squalor "as by a rope." Christiane's failures have paced his own: two unsuccessful marriages (one to a South American millionaire, the other to a German industrialist) and a scandal of a perversity startling even to Paris...
...short, he is not the passionate Dmitri Karamazov whom Dostoevsky envisioned--the enormously complicated sensualist who could cry out, "When I do leap into the pit, I go headlong with my heels up, and am pleased to be falling in that degrading attitude and pride myself upon it. . . . Though I may be following the devil I am Thy son, O Lord, and I love Thee...
...human follies that the race of man almost makes him retch. Crippled by polio, he has become a corrosive, nonstop monologuist with a tongue like a poisoned dart. Some of his more sardonic thrusts are directed at the Roman Catholic faith, which his wife Marjorie, a guilt-ridden sensualist of masochistic tendencies, is about to embrace. The bitterness of his remarks, including his view of his wife's imminent conversion as a "peace-at-any-price panic," will doubtless help make By Love Possessed a "controversial" novel...
...impressions bypass his mind and go right to his pen; it is a clarity that a weaker spirit might have intellectualized into obscurity. His best moments come when he makes true what the soon-to-depart Mr. Honig has said of him--"(Lorca) is above all a realistic sensualist who must have the secret of light bare...
Kirk Douglas is surprisingly satisfactory as Van Gogh, but there remains too much of the healthy, composed sensualist in his bearing. And he sometimes is not quite able to convey Van Gogh's frightening intensity. Anthony Quinn is excellent as Paul Gauguin, one of Van Gogh's few friends, but one-time stockbroker Gauguin was not so savage as he is shown in Lust for Life. The other acting is generally commendable, especially that of James Doland, who plays Van Gogh's brother Theo, a Paris art dealer who was the only person that thought Van Gogh a great artist...