Can-Can

Quite some time back, I bought this box set of Frank Sinatra movies. One of the movies in the set is Can-Can, which has been in the FXM rotation recently. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 6:00 AM (and I think two more times next week), so I recently sat down to watch it to do a post on here.

The setting is 1896 and Montmartre, the district of Paris known for its artists and bohemian lifestyle. Simone Pistache (Shirley MacLaine) owns a nightclub in Montmartre, and one of the things she does one night is to put on the can-can, the dance made famous by Jacques Offenbach's music 50 years earlier but which in 1896 is considered lewd and lascivious so it violates the obscenity laws, according to the League of decency.

On that particular night, Simone's lawyer François (Frank Sinatra) is there with a judge, Paul Barriere (Maurice Chevalier) who is approaching retirement age but is still on the bench and is a frend of François. Somebody has tipped off the authorities that the can-can is going to be performed, and they raid the place, arresting Simone while François and Paul are able to get away by disguising themselves as waiters.

François defends Simone at the trial, which is headed by multiple judges which I think was standard for the French legal system. One of the other judges is young Philippe Forrestier (Louis Jourdan). He absolutely wants to see the obscenity stopped, and is damn well going to use this trial as an opportunity to stop it if at all possible. However, Simone is just so lovely that Philippe winds up falling in love with her. This is a big problem because of the conflict of interest, but also because Simone has been pursuing François, who probably does love her but is also a confirmed bachelor.

Along the way, Philippe proposes to Simone, who doesn't necessarily want to accept, but decides to do so because she's sick and tired of François stringing her on. She's not right for Philippe's class of society, as seen in the engagement party on a boat in the Seine where she performs a disastrous musical number. She decides to come up with a scheme to get back at François for driving her into the arms of Philippe....

Can-Can is a story set to the music of Cole Porter and based on an earlier musical. The story itself isn't bad, and while some of Cole Porter's songs stand on their own -- indeed, a couple of Porter standards written well before the original stage show such as "Just One of Those Things" replace songs from the stage show -- I couldn't help but feel while watching this that several of the songs really slowed the movie down. I also thought about Fox jumping on the success of Gigi, although apparently the original stage show came out before the movie Gigi.

Specifically, I think I'd say that a lot of the songs that don't have dance numbers to go along with them are the problem here, especially when Jourdan gets a number. Sinatra gives it his best shot, and fans of his will certainly enjoy his singing. But he doesn't really fit in with la belle époque the way Jourdan and Chevalier do. Ironically, the best number in the movie, the Adam and Eve dance near the end, doesn't have much of anything to do with the plot at all and made me think of the cadenza that Gene Kelly put into Singin' in the Rain where he dances with Cyd Charisse.

Although I think Can-Can would have worked better as a straight-up comedy/light drama with only one or two numbers, it's still fairly watchable. The print FXM airs is in a 135-minute slot, while you may see reference sources putting it at 142 minutes. That's becaue the 142-minute running time (which is the one on the DVD I have) is the roadshow version, which includes an overture, a brief intermission, and exit music. Removing these (I know the FXM print doesn't have the overture, although I didn't watch it far enough to see if it skips the intermission and exit music although I'd presume it would) should get the movie down to under 135-minutes.