When a movie maker in a prudish society, such as America of the 50s, undertakes to show the life and loves of a figure in a libertine society, such as Paris of 1890, he faces the not so small obstacle that matters of sex are taboo. When that figure happens to be Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, whose life circled around the Moulin Rouge, this obstacle becomes a big hurdle, and the viewer is often left puzzled. How come the Moulin Rouge's patrons got so terribly excited about the dancing girls' long underpants? Did Henri really sleep in the loft all the time with Marie downstairs? The original novel by Pierre La Mure clarifies these things in sufficient detail - Hollywood skipped a few important pages.
Another silly Hollywood idea - and not dictated by the mores of the times - is to let "lower-class people" speak English with a French accent. We, the viewers, do know that the story plays in France, that the people would naturally speak French, and that all their conversations have been translated for us language-challenged Americans, but we don't need to be reminded of that all the time. And speaking of the audio channel, it would have been nice to understand the words of Zsa Zsa Gabor's songs - the patrons of the Moulin Rouge seemed to enjoy them; her accent doesn't help us either.
