The Greatest Movies You've Never Seen

Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) - Episode 2

noreply@blogger.com (Benj Wesley) — Sat, 29 Aug 2015 15:53:00 -0400

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What do a satirist science fiction writer from the early 1600s, a popular French play from 1897, a pulp fiction story from the 30s about a Chicago gangster, a Steve Martin film from the late 80s, a pop musical about a teenager working at a fast food restaurant, and a Disney Channel film about a rapper all have in common? Okay, this is a rhetorical question since the answer is literally in the title, but the answer is Cyrano de Bergerac.

Cyrano de Bergerac was actually a real guy.

The real CDB

He lived from 1619 to 1655, and he did have a big nose—he just didn’t look like Pinocchio.

I'm not sure why the nose
supposedly makes him ugly.

He was a member of the French military, but was also a novelist, writing satirical science fiction novels about fantastic trips to the sun and moon. An excerpt from Evan Eisenberg’s The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa on Google Books helped me find this part of Voyage to the Moon:

“As I opened the Box, I found within somewhat of Metal, almost like to our Clocks, full of I know not what little Springs and imperceptible Engines: It was a Book, indeed; but a Strange and Wonderful Book, that had neither Leaves nor Letters: In fine, it was a Book made wholly for the Ears, and not the Eyes. So that when any Body has a mind to read in it, he winds up that Machine with a great many Strings; then he turns the Hand to the Chapter which he desires to hear, and straight, as from the Mouth of a Man, or a Musical Instrument, proceed all the distinct and different Sounds, which the _Lunar_ Grandees make use of for expressing their Thoughts, instead of Language.

“When I since reflected on this Miraculous Invention, I no longer wondred that the Young--Men of that Country were more knowing at Sixteen or Eighteen years Old, than the Gray-Beards of our Climate; for knowing how to Read as soon as Speak, they are never without Lectures, in their Chambers, their Walks, the Town, or Travelling; they may have in their Pockets, or at their Girdles, Thirty of these Books, where they need but wind up a Spring to hear a whole Chapter, and so more, if they have a mind to hear the Book quite through; so that you never want the Company of all the great Men, living and Dead, who entertain you with Living Voices.”

Basically, Cyrano de Bergerac predicted the audiobook before even the phonograph was invented.

By the way, those clips are from Georges Melies’ A Trip to the Moon, which was sadly based mainly on Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon from what I understand, not those of C.D.B., though Verne did briefly reference Bergerac’s work in his book.

But alas, Cyrano de Bergerac would be doomed to be remembered, not as a science fiction writer (who was also possibly gay), but as the dueling lover with a giant nose with a wit and panache that would put Tony Stark to shame.

In 1897, Edmond Rostand wrote his play Cyrano de Bergerac, which is where everything you might think you know about Cyrano comes from. Here’s the basic plot: Cyrano is in love with Roxanne. But Cyrano has this gigantic nose, which apparently makes him unattractive. Cyrano meets this guy named Christian, who’s about the handsomest guy in the world and also in love with Roxanne; unfortunately, he’s kind of dumb. The two guys realize that with Cyrano’s brain and Christian’s beauty, they’d be the perfect guy, so they form a plan where Cyrano will tell Christian what to say to Roxanne. Roxanne falls in love with Christian, but then tells him that she loves him for his heart, not his looks. Ouch. Then Christian dies in battle, and Roxanne eventually figures out that it was Cyrano she was in love with all along. Unfortunately, she figures the big secret out right between when Cyrano is murdered and when he finally dies, so…happy ending?

Fun fact: I said earlier that Cyrano had “panache.” Panache, which according to Google means both a “flamboyant confidence of style or manner” and “a tuft or plume of feathers” was a French word that was introduced to the English language because of Cyrano de Bergerac.

The film I’m focusing on today is the 1950 adaption of Cyrano de Bergerac, called, well, Cyrano de Bergerac.

The movie was, fortunately for us, filmed in English, using a 1923 translation by Brian Hooker. Critics pointed out that it was basically a filmed stage play—though there is an action scene that was originally only referenced offstage, but in the film appears onscreen as Cyrano singlehandedly defeats 100 men with his magnificent swording skills. (Okay, swording isn’t a word. But it alliterates with skills.) And The New York Times thought that most of the actors were, and I quote, “colorless as the black-and-white photography.”

But there’s one thing you can’t deny about the movie, and that’s the fact that Jose Ferrer is one awesome Cyrano. And I can say that because he won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Of course, such a juicy plot—an ugly man wooing a beautiful girl through another—was too good to use just in a historical play reimagining a 17^th century writer.

In the 1930s, Anatole Feldmen wrote a series of pulp fiction stories about “Big Nose Serrano,” a Chicago gangster who “always kept a soft spot for a swell-looking frail.”

Then, in 1987, we got Roxanne, a Steve Martin movie about “C.D. Bales”—get it? CDB?—a fireman who woos Roxanne through another fireman named Chris.

In 2012, Disney Channel released a made-for-television movie called Let It Shine, about a black teenager named “Cyrus DeBarge”—honestly, it’s impossible to Americanize a name like Cyrano de Bergerac, stop trying—with a penchant for rapping. ‘Cause then it can end with a rap battle… And there’s a girl named Roxie and a guy named Kris—spelled K-R-I-S. However, this adaption left out the part about the nose.

And then, finally, a theater writer named Jeremy Desmon created a “jukebox musical” about a burger-flipping teenager with a large nose who…you know what, just take the original plot and replace “letters” with “text messages” and you’ve got the general gist. Probably the only adaption of Cyrano de Bergerac to include “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen, the title of this musical is…wait for it…Cyrano de BurgerShack.

Next week's film: If you know the song "Wot Cher! Knocked 'Em in the Old Kent Road," you're probably a fan of The Muppet Show, or else you're a fan of this movie. Extra hint: The star was white, but later became Black.

Pygmalion (1938) - Episode 1

noreply@blogger.com (Benj Wesley) — Sat, 22 Aug 2015 07:38:00 -0400

Episode 1: Pygmalion (1938)

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The original myth of Pygmalion is actually kind of creepy. (And there are non-rhyming translations, but I thought the rhyme was cooler.) Pygmalion is a guy who hated women after seeing some prostitutes. So instead of getting a real wife, he decides to make a sculpture of the “ideal woman.”

Pygmalion, of course, falls in love with his statue and starts making out with it. Then, on a feast-day celebrating Venus, the goddess of love, Pygmalion almost asks for his statue to come to life, but he realizes that would be crazy, so he asks instead for a bride that looks just like his statue. But Venus knows what he really meant, so when Pygmalion fondles and kisses the statue when he gets home, its lips turn warm and it comes to life, apparently undisturbed that her first experience as a human being is making out with her creator.

But everything’s cool and within ten months, their first son is born.

This is basically the most misogynistic, creepy version of Pinocchio ever.

And George Bernard Shaw, author of both the stage play and screenplay for Pygmalion, realized that. The play Pygmalion, perhaps better known for the musical it inspired, My Fair Lady, is not about a literal statue coming to life. It is about a low-class Cockney flower girl who is, in a sense, “brought to life” by being transformed into a duchess, or at least someone who can pass for one, by the pompous Professor Henry Higgins. But unlike the original Pygmalion, Professor Henry Higgins—the man who trains flower girl Eliza Doolittle to be a duchess—finds that he cannot control Eliza now that she has the ability to think for herself, and the play ends with Eliza leaving Henry, presumably to never return.

Okay, if this story has been sounding familiar to you, you’re might be confused right now because, as you remember it, the story ends with Eliza coming back to the professor. Allow me to explain why.

When George Bernard Shaw first put pen to paper, this was how the play ended:

HIGGINS … [Rising] By George, Eliza, I said I'd make a woman of you; and I have. I like you like this.

LIZA. Yes: you turn round and make up to me now that I'm not afraid of you, and can do without you.

HIGGINS. Of course I do, you little fool. Five minutes ago you were like a millstone round my neck. Now you're a tower of strength: a consort battleship. You and I and Pickering will be three old bachelors together instead of only two men and a silly girl.

Mrs. Higgins returns, dressed for the wedding. Eliza instantly becomes cool and elegant.

MRS. HIGGINS. The carriage is waiting, Eliza. Are you ready?

LIZA. Quite. Is the Professor coming?

MRS. HIGGINS. Certainly not. He can't behave himself in church. He makes remarks out loud all the time on the clergyman's pronunciation.

LIZA. Then I shall not see you again, Professor. Good bye. [She goes to the door].

MRS. HIGGINS [coming to Higgins] Good-bye, dear.

HIGGINS. Good-bye, mother. [He is about to kiss her, when he recollects something]. Oh, by the way, Eliza, order a ham and a Stilton cheese, will you? And buy me a pair of reindeer gloves, number eights, and a tie to match that new suit of mine, at Eale & Binman's. You can choose the color. [His cheerful, careless, vigorous voice shows that he is incorrigible].

LIZA [disdainfully] Buy them yourself. [She sweeps out].

MRS. HIGGINS. I'm afraid you've spoiled that girl, Henry. But never mind, dear: I'll buy you the tie and gloves.

HIGGINS [sunnily] Oh, don't bother. She'll buy em all right enough. Good-bye.

They kiss. Mrs. Higgins runs out. Higgins, left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.

I personally enjoy this ending to the play, because Higgins gets what’s been coming to him by using Eliza as his slipper-retriever and he’s still too thickheaded to realize it. But audiences couldn’t bear the thought of the male and female protagonists of a play not getting together in the end, so the original actors playing Higgins and Eliza ended the play with Higgins tossing a bouquet of flowers to Eliza.

Shaw did not like this, and actually wrote a “sequel” to Pygmalion in prose that’s actually pretty boring, detailing exactly what happens to the characters after the play ends. Eliza Doolittle doesn’t marry Henry Higgins. She marries another character named Freddy.

When the movie version was made in 1938, even though Shaw wrote the screenplay, a new ending was created without his permission in which, after Eliza leaves Henry to marry Freddy, she returns and Higgins, misogynistic as ever, asks her for his slippers.

When the musical My Fair Lady was created, based on Pygmalion, it actually wasn’t adapted from the play—it was adapted from the 1938 screenplay, which included some new scenes like the one at the ball—and the infamous ending. When the Broadway musical was filmed as a movie in 1964—keeping Rex Harrison as Higgins from the Broadway run but replacing Julie Andrews as Eliza with Audrey Hepburn because Andrews wasn’t famous enough—the changed ending from the 1938 film was immortalized in audience’s minds forever.

What would George Bernard Shaw think of this ending? Well, he actually conceded that it was “too inconclusive to be worth making a fuss about,” though he refused to call it a “happy ending,” saying “I cannot conceive a less happy ending to the story of ‘Pygmalion’ than a love affair between the middle-aged, middle-class professor, a confirmed old bachelor with a mother-fixation, and a flower girl of 18.”

Just as Shaw retold an old myth in a drastic new way, his take on the myth would be retold in many drastic new ways as well. I’ve already mentioned the musical and film adaption of the same, My Fair Lady. The play has been filmed several times, but its legacy lives on in such classics as Pretty Woman, about a prostitute who undergoes an Eliza-like transformation, She’s All That, a movie about a high schooler who bets he can turn any girl into Prom Queen (which actually referenced Pretty Woman), and…can we not talk about Selfie? Okay, Selfie was a quickly cancelled ABC series about “Eliza Dooley,” a sales rep who hires “Henry Higgs” to help her improve her image. Literally, it didn’t even last 3 months on air. Finally, there’s Galatea by Emily Short, an interactive fiction, if you want to call it that, where you can have a conversation with the statue in a museum.

Other fun facts: Pygmalion wasn’t the only time George Bernard Shaw adapted a classic myth into a drastically different retelling. His play Man and Superman, (no, not the DC Comics character) was his version of the classic Don Juan story, which incidentally also involves a statue coming to life. Don Juan, or Don Giovanni, as the story is generally told, is a man of…loose morals, shall we say, who seduces a girl and ends up killing her father, but the father comes back to life in the form of a statue. Don invites the statue to dinner and the statue generally ends up dragging Don Juan to hell, though in some versions, apparently, Don Juan is saved. This story is probably most popular because of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. (If you’ve seen Sherlock Holmes 2: Game of Shadows, that’s the opera that appears in the movie. It’s also in Amadeus, but pretty much every Mozart opera is in that movie.) In Man and Superman, however, Shaw flipped the story on its head by having Jack Tanner, the Don Juan character, pursued by the woman, Ann.

Pygmalion (1938) is in the public domain, and can be watched for free online at archive.org:

Next week's movie: The original Greek myth of Pygmalion is reminiscent of the more modern classic Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. This 1950 film does not involve anybody coming to life, but the main character has a physical feature that may invite comparisons to Pinocchio.