Cyrano de Bergerac (1950)
Cyrano is the coolest guy in 1600s France, but he has a big nose and that means he’ll have to wait until moments before dying to be loved.
There’s a nice trivia question that resurfaced in 2022: which three fictional characters have been portrayed by multiple actors who won Oscars for their performances?1 If you’re playing along at home, hopefully you didn’t guess “Cyrano de Bergerac,” since, although José Ferrer won a Best Actor statue for playing him in 1950, Gerard Depardieu did not win for his take on the character forty years later.2 Also, Cyrano de Bergerac wasn’t fictional, though the movie (quoting Wikipedia here) “contains invention and myth.”
Movie Cyrano de Bergerac3 is the greatest soldier, poet, philosopher, musician, playwright, and swordsman who ever lived. His only flaw is his big honkin’ nose.
All that stands between Cyrano and the woman he loves (his cousin Roxane) is his nose4 and Roxane’s love for pretty-boy Baron Christian de Neuvillete. Christian cannot woo Roxane since he’s basically a Ken doll, so Cyrano offers to lend his personality to Christian to help him seduce her. It works: Christian and Roxane marry, mere moments before Christian and Cyrano are told to report to Spain to fight the Thirty Years’ War.5
During the war, Christian discovers that Roxane loves him for his personality and not for his rockin’ bod, teaching him that she actually belongs with Cyrano. Right as Christian is about to reveal to Roxane that he’s been a sexy puppet for Cyrano’s words, Christian dies, sending Roxane into mourning. Cyrano says nothing about this for FOURTEEN YEARS, right until he is assassinated for being too brave or principled or intelligent or whatever. As he’s dying, he finally tells the truth to Roxane and she discovers that it’s Cyrano she has loved all along. Then Cyrano dies, the end.
Rating: 8/10, but c’mon, man, just tell your cousin you love her.
Cast and Crew
In 1950, José Ferrer was already a star. He had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor for 1948’s Joan of Arc (directed by Victor Fleming of Gone With the Wind and Wizard of Oz fame) and won the inaugural Best Actor Tony in 1947 (he shared the award with Fredric March, another Hollywood legend who we’ll be seeing soon in this column). He had also married Rosemary Clooney6 for the first of two times. We’ll catch up with Ferrer again soon in this column.
The Trivia
Playwright Edmond Rostand (1868 – 1918) is mostly known for writing “Cyrano de Bergerac” in 1897, but he also did “Les Romanesques” (1894), which was adapted into 1960’s “The Fantasticks” by Tom Jones. “The Fantasticks,” about two neighbors who trick their children into falling in love by pretending to feud, is the longest-running musical ever.
Rostand was elected to the Académie Française, a body comprised of forty members known as “the immortals.” Members are appointed for life, though they can be expelled for grave misconduct; Phillipe Petain, appointed after being named Marshal of France for generalship in the Battle of Verdun, was thrown out in 1945 for, y’know, all the Vichy France stuff. You may know the Académie as France's official authority on the usage, vocabulary, and grammar of the French language.7
The real Cyrano de Bergerac was a playwright from 1619 to 1655. That means his life overlapped with the “big three” 1600s French playwrights: Molière, Jean Racine, and Pierre Corneille. Jean Racine is known for the plays “Phedra” and “Britannicus,” while Molière is known for “Tartuffe,” “The Miser,” and “The Misanthrope.” Corneille is, uh, the Chris Bosh of the Big Three.
The film version of Cyrano uses a blank verse translation from Brian Hooker (1880 – 1946). He’s not in the trivia canon, but he’s descended from Thomas Hooker, a Puritan leader who is considered to have founded the Colony of Connecticut. The 1990 Cyrano uses Anthony Burgess’ translation; Burgess is best known as the author of “A Clockwork Orange.”
Odds and Ends
On Cyrano’s deathbed, he reports some of the town news to Roxane. One big story:
Tuesday, the King fell ill after six helpings of marron glacés. Marron glacés will no longer be served at court.
Marron glacés, literally “ice chestnut,” is a chestnut preserved in sugar. It seems desserts in the past left something to be desired.
Those characters are the Joker (played by Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix), Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro), and, most recently, Anita from West Side Story (Rita Moreno in 1961 and Ariana DeBose in the 2021 remake).
Steve Martin played a version of Cyrano in Roxanne (1987), though his name in that film is Charlie "C.D." Bales and he wasn’t nominated for an Oscar. Cool movie, though.
His name means “Cyrano of Bergerac”—though if you’re better than me at French, you may have already figured that out. Bergerac is a town in present-day Nouvelle-Aquitaine, which is the largest region in France. You may know its prefecture, Bordeaux. We’ll do a deep dive on French geography another day.
At least, that’s what we’re told to believe. Having grown up with the Ugly Guy, Hot Wife TV trope, though, it’s hard to trust the movie.
What do people know about the Thirty Years’ War? Mostly that it was a decades-long conflict somewhat shorter than the Hundred Years’ War. But if you want some non-tautological facts about it, know that it was fought (at least in part) because of Catholic-Protestant divisions and that it was ended (sorta) with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.
Rosemary Clooney is best known for co-starring with Bing Crosby in Irving Berlin’s White Christmas (1954) and for being George Clooney’s aunt.
Yes, this means you can blame the Académie for French’s ridiculous spelling conventions. Also note that the Académie is different than the Panthéon, France’s mausoleum of heroes. You might remember that the Panthéon was in the news in 2021 when Josephine Baker became the first Black woman added to it.