Cyrano de Bergerac (1950)

If you ever looked at lists of Oscar winners in reference sources, there are some movies that have always shown up on TV a lot less than others. One of the less common movies, in my view, would be Jose Ferrer's Oscar-winning role in 1950 for Cyrano de Bergerac. TCM ran it back in March as part of 31 Days of Oscar, and not having blogged about it before, I recorded it. Recently, I finally sat down to watch it.

The basic synopsis of the story is probably known. Cyrano (that's Jose Ferrer, obviously), is a nobleman in 17th century France who is in love with his beautiful cousin Roxane (Mala Powers). But because he has a nose that would put Jimmy Durante to shame, he knows that Roxane will never return his affection. Indeed, she's in love with military officer Christian (William Prince). Cyrano decided to befriend Christian and help him win Roxane by writing love verses for Christian to recite to Roxane, in order that Cyrano himself may remain close to Roxane.

There's a lot more to the story, of course. Cyrano's flamboyancy, combined with the desire to win Roxane and his own sense of honor, gets him into trouble repeatedly, winning a duel in the first act and then developing powerful enemies over the course of the rest of the movie. There's also Christian's commanding officer, the Comte de Guiche (Ralph Clanton), who is also in love with Roxane and even plans to push her into a marriage that she clearly doesn't want. Cyrano schemes to get Roxane married off to Christiane just before he and de Guiche are to go fight the Spanish, leading to tragedy.

Cyrano de Bergerac is a bit of a tough movie to judge, because it's based on Edmond Rostand's play in the French form of blank verse, with most of the screenplay for this movie coming from a translation that kept the blank verse pattern. Shakespeare, of course, famously wrote in blank verse, but he was writing in English, and he's rather more famous than Rostand. So Hollywood viewed the project with some trepidation and the result was a movie produced by United Artists on a much more modest budget. The print that TCM showed reminded me of watching the Luis Buñuel version of Robinson Crusoe; it's murky and looks like a bad TV print.

Also not helping the movie is the extent to which Ferrer utterly dominates the proceedings. It's not hard to see why he won the Oscar, but at the same time everyone else comes off too pale by comparison, especially Powers and Prince as the two lovers.

So Cyrano de Bergerac is one of those movies that's not necessarily the easiest movie to sit down and watch and just be entertained by, but it's also one of those movies that deserves to be seen.