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-dramatizing hero.
In...