Panache

Film: Cyrano de Bergerac (1950)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library/Internet video on laptop.

In the more than five years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve had surprisingly few technical problems. Sadly, that was not the case with the 1950 version of Cyrano de Bergerac. Somewhere before the 30 minute mark, the DVD flatly stopped playing. It just wouldn’t get past that point. Thankfully, the film was completely available on YouTube. I think, though, this is one of the only times I’ve been forced to watch a film on multiple formats. It’s all to the good, though. The YouTube video turned out to be of much better quality than the DVD. Then, due to internet connection problems, I had to switch back to the DVD. The things I go through for this blog.

Cyrano de Bergeracis, at least in my mind the quintessential tragic romance. I know the traditional choice is Romeo and Juliet, but Cyrano is a better story in my mind. The bulk of the reason for that is the character of Cyrano himself. Cyrano (Jose Ferrer) is in many ways the perfect tragic hero. He’s everything a hero should be and has a single tragic flaw: his nose. Cyrano is smart, witty, courageous, filled with panache, and is cursed with a nose three or four times larger than that of the average man. That nose is in fact the reason for Cyrano’s courage and flair. Only the bravest or most foolhardy would dare tease him about his nose.

Walking the Party Line

Film: Pillow Talk
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla Digital on The Nook.

When I think of comedies with a more sexual edge, I don’t generally think of the late 1950s as the go-to era. That is what we get with Pillow Talk, though. This is one of those “of its era” movies because the plot turns on something that simply has no real modern adjunct. I expected this to be squeaky clean in terms of sexual content and innuendo and I was pleasantly mistaken on that front. Oh, there’s no nudity here, but there’s a great deal of implied sex and at one point, an unmarried young woman goes off to a wilderness hideaway with a man. That seems forward for a film in Eisenhower’s America.

That old school conceit here is a party line telephone in New York. In this case, the line is shared by Jan Morrow (Doris Day) and Brad Allen (Rock Hudson). Brad, as is often the case in this sort of movie, is a wildly successful creative type. He’s a songwriter currently working on a new score for a Broadway show. In addition to being a successful songwriter, Brad is also quite the ladies’ man and has a habit of tying up the line talking to the women in his substantial little black book. He frequently plays these women a song he’s written “just for them.” It’s actually the same song regardless of woman, with the appropriate name tacked in at the end of each line.