Word: tramping
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Marceau has obviously tutored himself on early Charlie Chaplin. The Little Tramp wore a derby; Marceau's Bip character sports a dented stovepipe hat. In The Tramp's hand was a flower; from Bip's hat sprouts a rose. Both share the knowledge that no matter how funny the pratfall, the heart is where the hurt is. In nursing that hurt, Marcel Marceau shows himself to be a stylish musician of motion, an exciting architect of empty space, an eloquent poet of silence...
...airports, how far they walk, their interchange problems." The results of his findings were dramatized by longtime Saarinen Friend Charles Eames-for the benefit of the FAA and airline officials who needed convincing about mobile lounges-in a ten-minute cartoon film whose sound track featured the tramp-tramp, clunk-clunk of aching feet plodding through the measureless tunnels of the nation's sprawling airports...
...evening, while she muses on her doorstep, a tall old tramp (Georges Wilson) strides by. She staggers back, moves as if to cry out, hesitates, stares after him bewildered. Impossible! But for an instant she could have sworn the old tramp was her husband! Next day when he comes by again she asks him in. He has a kind mouth and sad eyes that light up wonderfully when she plays Rossini on the jukebox, but something in his face suggests a damaged and diminished man. "I've lost my memory," he explains shyly. She faints. She is sure...
...speaks her husband's name: "Albert Langlois." No reaction. She recalls her husband's record in the Resistance, the prisons he was held in. Still no reaction. She confronts the tramp with her husband's aunt. Not a flicker of recognition. She feeds him the dishes her husband loved. He cannot remember them. In agony she cries out: "Why do you refuse your past! Why do you refuse your life!" Then she sees the awful scar on the back of his head...
Director Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim), a prime mover of the New Wave, exploits his star's Chaplinesque lost-waif charm, but Aznavour lacks the clownish resilience that enabled Chaplin's eternal tramp to give as good as he took from life. A hero who falls to his defeat generates dramatic interest; but the piano player seems to wallow in the complacency of his own despair, as if he were past caring and past caring about. Truffaut's centrifugal direction sends pieces of crime thriller, love story, and psychological case study flying off at unrelated tangents. Moreover...