Cinema: The Brush-Off

El Greco, like nearly every movie biography of a master painter, uses the artist’s art in much the way that a schoolgirl uses paper lace to decorate her valentines. On the heart of this large mushy studio card, dripping with De-Luxe color and local color (from stunning location sites in Spain), is the usual message: Be Mine. Mel Ferrer as the young old master says it to Rosanna Schiaffino as the highborn senorita whose family will not allow her to be his. Rosanna ultimately dies in a convent, post partum and penitent, paying dearly for what began as just another portrait sitting. After a brush with a heretic-hunting cardinal (Mario Feliciani) of the Spanish Inquisition, Mel goes quietly to pieces and spends the brief epilogue in an asylum, where demented models presumably inspire his oddly elongated, mystical portraits of the saints.

As a short course in art depreciation, El Greco distorts the little that is known of the artist’s life: born Domenikos Theotokopoulos on the island of Crete in 1541, he spent his young manhood in Venice and Rome, then moved to Toledo, where he died old, honored, contentious, debt-ridden and proud. Though the rest of the drama appears to be based on hysterical inaccuracies, the strain in Spain lies mainly in Actor Ferrer, who portrays the temper of genius with a flatness more appropriate to Toledo, Ohio. Dressed in custom-tailored smocks and tunics, Mel looks like nothing so much as a paid escort en route to the Beaux-Arts Ball.