Fanny

When the 1954 Harold Rome Broadway musical, Fanny (888 performances), was about to be turned into a Hollywood movie, Joshua Logan, co-author of the book with S. N. Behrman and director of the show, received an unpleasant surprise.

As Logan, equally at home in movies, set out to direct, studio head Jack Warner informed him that movie musicals were out, and that Fanny would be transformed into a dramatic feature. Logan, who had cast a number of fine singing actors, was disconcerted; Rome unjustly anathemized him for the change. The best Logan could obtain was that the lovely score be turned into tuneful background music.

So the movie, with a screenplay by the talented Julius J. Epstein (among other things, co-author of the Casablanca script), came out in 1961, garnering some good reviews and five Oscar nominations (losing Best Picture to West Side Story), but not a huge success. Even the worthy film lexicographer Leslie Halliwell writes as follows: "Lumbering adaptation of three [Marcel] Pagnol films of the thirties (Marius, Fanny, César)…this is the dullest version, despite fine photography and a couple of good performances." Well, not all's well even with Halliwell.

Now, finally, we have Fanny on DVD, and I, for one, am in total agreement with the 1961 New York Times assessment, "A delightful and heartwarming film." Of course, it isn't quite up to Pagnol's tripartite masterpiece, the so-called "Marseilles Trilogy," the author's adaptation of his three plays into three equally effective pictures. As Logan says in Movie Stars, Real People, and Me, "Fanny was a minor classic in France. The three plays…are almost worshiped by the French, and Marcel Pagnol was one of the immortals of the Academié Française."

The Epstein-Logan conflation of three films into one could nowise equal the French films with their leisurely reveling in the Marseillais idiom, accent and wit. That so much of the savor nevertheless survives in this Hollywood movie makes it something more than a "minor classic"—a minor miracle.

What Logan achieved is, first of all, the most authentic French film ever made in America. No mean achievement when you consider that what the best French cooking does for our palate, this movie does for our spirits.

[IMG:R]Logan and his team shot exclusively on French, mostly Marseilles, locations. A big problem: The western part of the colorful and essential old waterfront had been rebuilt in unsightly concrete. Something suitable, however, survived in nearby Cassis. So, Logan records, "We would play every scene twice—once in Marseilles while the cameras looked east and once in Cassis when the cameras looked west. Cut together, they would be one harbor." One of the all-time greatest cinematographers, Jack Cardiff, captured views of harbor and town that equal the work of that master seascape painter, the impressionist Eugène Boudin.

Countless difficulties had to be overcome to film the story of the two young lovers, Marius and Fanny, separated because the self-sacrificing Fanny pushes the misunderstanding Marius towards his other love, the sea. Off he goes, piqued, on a five-year maritime adventure, but the loving Fanny is pregnant, and to stave off family dishonor, marries the rich elderly sailmaker Panisse, who adores her. This hardens the absent Marius' heart and saddens the youth's bar-owner father, César, but delights Fanny's greedy fish-and-vegetable-seller mother, Honorine.

A son is born to Mr. and Mrs. Panisse, to the joy of the former and his relatives, the melancholy of Fanny, and near-heartbreak of Marius. But the boy Césario thrives under Panisse's adoring overindulgence, Fanny's solicitude (every morning she sees Marius in him), and César's complaisant godfatherhood. Eventually, Marius returns, self-effacingly enough, and Panisse suffers a fatal heart attack, occasioning a final generosity: willing that Marius marry Fanny and the boy grow up loved by both, as well as inheriting Panisse's prosperous business and large fortune.

Yes, the story is sentimental, and, sure, the film, however humorous, is ultimately a tearjerker. But that is Logan's achievement: He has made the movie as passionately emotional as few Hollywood films have ever been—gloriously, romantically French. Furthermore, not overlooking vivid cinematic movement and sense of picturesque detail, he has elicited theatrical rather than movie acting, bursting with unabashed sentiment, fearlessly animated closeups, and overflowing love, humor, anger and pain.

Leslie Caron, who felicitously replaced the unavailable Audrey Hepburn as Fanny, gives the performance of anybody's lifetime. I defy any man—watching her radiantly passionate young girl grow into a torn but gallant wife and unfulfilled yet giving mother—not to fall in love with this Fanny. As Marius, the handsome and intense young Horst Buchholz superbly embodies a youth riven by two conflicting loves. The pair of them emerge as possibly the best Romeo and Juliet I've ever seen on film, their tribulations—wonderfully unmilked by screenplay and direction—eliciting the sincerest laughter and tears. The ending, in fact, is a triumph of understatement.

And then those tremendously moving character performances: Charles Boyer as the crusty and grumpily droll César, full of often frustrated fatherly love; and Maurice Chevalier, extraordinary as the infectiously jolly, but also comically excitable, loving and touching Panisse. Moreover such winning veterans as Salvatore Baccaloni, Raymond Bussières, Victor Francen, Lionel Jeffries, and newcomer Georgette Anys (as a deliciously tart and roly-poly Honorine) lending expert support—what more could you ask?

Deeply satisfying, too, is that this totally European and predominantly French cast speaks charming, naturally French-accented English (none of that phony central casting stuff), thus vastly enhancing the film's authenticity. When, I ask myself, have I laughed and cried as much as during my two viewings of this DVD? While waiting for City Center Encores! to see fit to revive this delightful musical, I congratulate Westchester Films and Image Entertainment on providing, in a small package, such large and lasting joy.

John Simon is the New York theater critic for Bloomberg News.