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 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.
Purists will probably carp at some changes, e.g., at least two of the play's characters have disappeared, leaving their 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 core of unblushing sentiment, unstinted gallantry, unending heroics. In this harsh light, middle-aged moviegoers who loved Cyrano in their youth may feel that they are looking at an early sweetheart who has aged 30 years.
Audiences, traditionally willing to meet this impossibly romantic classic half way, may have to go a bit further this time. Their surest reward will be a fine performance by Actor Ferrer, who gets uniformly good support from Mala Powers, a pretty Roxane. William Prince does well as the tongue-tied Christian, and Ralph Clanton as the haughty Comte de Guiche. Ferrer gives his role its full measure of lovelorn fervor, comic flair and wry pathos. Wearing the white plume with grand-mannered dash and strut, he also displays the kind of swordsmanship that ought to charm the popcorn set into listening to the poetry.
> Mad Wednesday (RKO Radio], starring Harold Lloyd, one of the great comedians of silent pictures, is a curious mixture of high comic invention and low humor. Filmed five years ago by Preston (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek) Sturges under the title The Sin of Harold Diddle-bock, it contains a fuzzy exposition of Writer-Director Sturges' economic philosophy ("This is a picture against security. It shows that trouble sharpens the wit and security dulls it"). As currently released by RKO's Howard Hughes, who ended a brief partnership with Sturges in 1946, Mad Wednesday has suffered some cutting and at least one lamentable addition, e.g., a talking cab horse.