Fanny

Yet another of the movies that I had sitting on my DVR that's coming up again on TCM is Fanny. It's next airing is tomorrow, March 23, at 3:30 PM, which is why you're getting the post on it now.

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Fanny is played by Leslie Caron, and is a young woman of 18 living in Marseilles with her mother Honorine, who sells fish in the seaside equivalent of a farmers' market at some time in the past. (This movie was released in 1961, based on a musical from several years earlier which was in turn based on stories written in the 1920s. And, as you'll see, there's a ten-year gap between acts of the movie. The earlier scenes in this movie, however, don't look like they're set in any sort of past beyond an old car here and there.) Fanny is in love with Marius (Horst Buchholz), who is the son of César (Charles Boyer), a bartender at the sort of bar that served the sailors and where you wonder how the proprietor could earn a living. As such, Marius doesn't care for ths sort of life, and wants to go to sea where he feels he can be free.

Although Fanny loves Marius, he only sees her as a friend. Meanhile, Panisse (Maurice Chevalier) is a man who has saved up a bunch of money. So when he approaches Honorine, she unsurprisingly thinks he's like to live with her and be a father figure to Fanny. She's shocked to learn that he's willing to marry Fanny (who doesn't want an 18-year-old who looks like Leslie Caron). Never mind the fact that Fanny doesn't have any feelings for Panisse and has no desire to marry him. She only pines for Marius. But Marius is looking into getting a job with a scientific research vessel that's going to be at sea for five years. Even though Fanny is willing to wait, Marius says she shouldn't. She lets Marius go off to sea, because she doesn't want Marius to have any regrets.

Of course, the night before Marius goes off to sea would be the one night that Marius and Fanny make sweet sweet love. And of course, that one time they get it on is, in the best Hollywood tradition, enough to get Fanny knocked up. She knows the baby needs a father, so she sucks it up and tells Panisse she's going to marry him. Panisse doesn't much care since he's OK with having Fanny near him, even if she doesn't love him and still holds a torch for Marius.

Marius comes back and sees the child, but Fanny isn't going to punish Panisse. Several years later, the child is given the opportunity to meet the man who is his father without actually being told this is the father. By this time, Panisse has gotten old enough that he's about to die.

Fanny feels like one of those old-fashioned movies that will appeal to a certain sort of viewer. I'm sorry to say that I'm not particularly that sort of viewer. Having said that, everybody involved does a professional job with the material, and a good portion was shot on location, and in color, which are both big plusses. It would just be nice if all of this were in service of a better story.