Word: cyrano
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Cyrano de Bergerac. José Ferrer in a cinemadaptation that somewhat magnifies the faults of the Rostand classic without dimming its virtues (TIME...
...Cyrano de Bergerac (Stanley Kramer; United Artists) is Hollywood's first attempt to film Edmond Rostand's classic verse comedy about the monstrous-nosed swordsman-poet who wooed his adored Roxane for another man. If it is not all that admirers of the play might wish, it is more than most of them might dare to expect. Producer Stanley (The Men) Kramer keeps faith with the unabashedly romantic spirit of the original, and Actor Jose Ferrer, who gave Broadway its most recent (1946) production of the play, is the very embodiment of Rostand's self-sacrificing, self...
...most ways, the story has been intelligently remolded for the screen. Working from the Brian Hooker translation, Scripter Carl Foreman has tightened the play's continuity-a good idea in any Cyrano production-without muffling its lyricism or wit. By dramatizing Rostand's offstage action and breaking each scene into bits small enough for the camera to digest, he has given the picture unusual mobility for an adaptation from the stage. Among the additions: a blade-by-blade filming of Cyrano's duel with the cutthroats...
...crucial lines to be read by others. But ironically, the picture's weakness lies in its fidelity to Rostand's design rather than in the liberties it takes with his text. Flamboyantly theatrical, the play is given to such bald devices as the balcony scene in which Cyrano gulls Roxane into taking his voice for Christian's. Such broad strokes of old-fashioned footlight hokum seem glaringly magnified by the realistic eye of Director Michael Gordon's camera. The hard scrutiny of the lens also shows less mercy !han the stage for Cyrano's soft...
...though, are too great to leave one's conscience unburdened, particularly when one owes his very existence to some of these stuffed species. Perhaps the zoologists have tried to laugh away any feelings of guilt, with the Proboscis Mankey as the butt of their joke. Like Rostand writing of Cyrano, the placard describes Proboscis as of "large size, bright colors, and grotesque nose . . . curiously elongated and flexible . . . The special use to which he puts it is doubtful...