Hollywood’s adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s sensational play, the then stage star José Ferrer reprised his Tony-winning titular role on the celluloid and also fortuitously bagged him an Oscar, an hors-concours accomplishment for theater thespians, which would only be followed by a selected few, Shirley Booth and Yul Brynner, respectively for COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA (1952) and THE KING AND I (1956), are the only names that spring to this reviewer’s mind on the spot.
Intimated by its bare-bones setting of a rather unglamorous Paris in the early 17th century, director Michael Gordon is tasked to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, diligently uses dark shades to hide the blemishes of the production’s reductive means and simultaneously adorn some chiaroscuro sheen, he, nevertheless, finds his messiah in his leading man.
As the valiant, erudite swordsman-cum-poet, absurdly stigmatized by a disproportionately giant, factitiously affixed nose, Ferrer’s Cyrano de Bergerac gracefully dances his deepest self-abasement away with highfalutin elocution, which is enunciated through his sonorous pitch and undulating cadence, and sounds like a string of dulcet refrains plinking upon the surface of a cauldron of levity, ridicule, fervor and affection, while his emotional register plateaus majestically in tandem with the wreath of florid wordings, which to an anglophone’s ear, they are like molasses to a ravenous bruin. So much so that, the rest of the cast has no chance of holding a candle to him, only Mala Powers’ Roxanne occasionally glistens with her demure propriety and wide-eyed innocuousness, although that doesn’t necessarily justify Roxanne’s ill-devised antediluvian quixotism.
Sometimes, the massive content of Cyrano’s incessant oratory doesn’t even seem to matter literally since the story has its inherently implausible occurrences requesting the most rigid suspension of a viewer’s disbelief, the film simply rides on the coattail of its source material’s irrepressible vitality (which is strenuously translated from French into high English by Brian Hooker), Dimitri Tiomkin’s playful and stentorian orchestral accompaniment, and its dramatis personae’s full-blown operatics, then sails safely to the finish-line where theatrics triumphs over narrative intrigues. For once, Michael Gordon’s CYRANO DE BERGERAC bracingly circumvents the media-switching snag often haunts the dicey game of theater-to-cinema transposition and expeditiously renders the former’s infectious rhetorics to soar on the latter’s deceptively modest canvas.
referential entries: Max Ophüls’ LA RONDE (1950, 6.5/10); Daniel Mann’s COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA (1952, 7.7/10).
