(2 of 2)
Desiree (20th Century-Fox) is the $4,000,000 CinemaScope tribute to Napoleon based on Annemarie Selinko's 1953 bestselling oo-la-la, which takes Marlon Brando out of his blue jeans and jams him, literally and esthetically, into Empire . tights. It takes all the Brando talent to avoid looking like Stanley Kowalski at the Beaux Arts Ball. The script tells the story of Napoleon's first love, the daughter of a wealthy merchant in Marseille. Napoleon is an ambitious young general without a command who asks for Desiree (Jean Simmons) in marriage and for her money in advance. With her cash in hand, he buys a ticket to Paris and gets engaged to Josephine. Is Desiree downhearted? Pouf! She nabs herself one of Napoleon's best generals, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (Michael Rennie), who becomes Crown Prince of Sweden, makes her his Crown Princess.
After that the film turns into something like a tour of the wax museum: every two minutes another famous historical event. The tableaux rush by so fast that there is hardly time to realize how magnificently they are dressed. Napoleon's coronation, for instance, in ermine and blood-crimson, sky-blue and gold, is a piece of braggart beautification intended, it would appear, to prove that Fox can put on a better show than the British Commonwealth. In between the state oc casions, Actress Simmons wanders through palace after palace, wearing a country-mouse look that seems to say, "Gee! All this History and poor little me!"
Marlon Brando is the only principal who shows enough histrionic personality to overpower the overpowering costumes. Not that he really plays Napoleon: the Selinko version of the great dictator does not ask that. But he beetles his brows and pots his belly in the manner of the official portraits; and to avoid a vocal dissonance with the rest of the cast, he even achieves a slight British accent.