Fanny

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mahlerii
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Fanny

Post by mahlerii »

I was quite suprised to see this on this week's Essentials. Not because it's bad, but for a couple of reasons-

1. Horst Buchholz. I thought he was only in the Magnificent 7 in the US, but now I've also seen him in Billy Wilder's One, Two Three. I really think he is (was) a very good actor.

2. I thought that Fanny was a film of the musical by Harold Rome. The song "Be Kind To Your Parents" is from it. Was there ever a movie from that musical?

I will be interested in seeing this movie, but I may not see it on Saturday night because a potential musical collaborator is coming to visit. Maybe I'll put a video tape in the VCR if my wife lets me!
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moira finnie
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Post by moira finnie »

Fanny is one of my all time favorite movies. The cast, led by Charles Boyer as Cesar, is splendid and Boyer received a deserved Oscar nomination for his role. (I'd love to see a Boyer triple feature on TCM of Fanny, The Happy Time and Cluny Brown someday). The romance between Leslie Caron and Horst Buchholz* is palpably real and ultimately moving. The city of Marseilles where this is photographed by Jack Cardiff glistens and you can almost smell the salt air (and the stale Pernod in Cesar & Maurius' bar). The film is being released on dvd on June 17th, so perhaps more info about the production will accompany the disc.

I grew up listening to an album of Ezio Pinza and Walter Slezak sing Harold Rome's music and devoured Marcel Pagnol's books and trilogy of '30s movies (which are Marius, Cesar & Fanny) that inspired the musical. Alas, according to Joshua Logan in his autobiography, "Josh, My Up and Down, In and Out Life", the film was planned entirely as a musical, but for arcane financial reasons, and possibly because of disputes with Rome and adapter S.N. Berhman, plans were dropped. You can, fortunately, hear a lovely melody from the musical throughout the film. I hope that you enjoy it, Mahlerii. Maybe someday another filmmaker will be able to bring this durable story to the screen as Harold Rome's beautiful musical.

Here's a taste of the music and charm of Fanny (1960) from YouTube:

[youtube][/youtube]

____________________________
* Btw, you might want to check out Billy Wilder's One, Two Three on TCM sometime. Horst is very funny as a commie in this one. In one of his last screen appearances, Buchholz can also be seen in Life Is Beautiful as a Nazi Officer who knew Roberto Benigni before the war.
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Post by jdb1 »

As I recall, Florence Henderson was Fanny on Broadway. Does that ring a bell with anyone? I remember "Be Kind to Your Parents (Tho' They Don't Deserve It)", and I remember a tenor singing something like "Only you long as I may live - Fanny, Fanny, Fanny." In those days everyone bought the cast albums, even if they didn't see the show, so they would know all the "in" songs of the day.
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Post by sandykaypax »

I'm looking forward to seeing Fanny. I remember seeing it many years ago on tv when I was a kid. The FLIX channel was showing it a couple of months ago, but, alas, in pan and scan, so I skipped it. I'm so excited that TCM will be showing the widescreen version!

I saw the trailer for Fanny last night when I was watching the Sophia Loren flicks on TCM. I was struck by how beautiful and contemporary Leslie Caron looked. She really looked prettier with longer hair.

Sandy K
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Post by charliechaplinfan »

I've just watched the three French films called the Fanny Trilogy (Marius, Fanny and Cesar) which is what Fanny is based on. They are some of the best movies I've ever seen. I'm curious to know what you think of Fanny the musical with Leslie Caron.
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Post by moira finnie »

charliechaplinfan wrote:I've just watched the three French films called the Fanny Trilogy (Marius, Fanny and Cesar) which is what Fanny is based on. They are some of the best movies I've ever seen. I'm curious to know what you think of Fanny the musical with Leslie Caron.
I love 'em all, CCfan. The original films in The Fanny Trilogy, even though the versions I saw were in terrible need of restoration, were beautiful despite this, but then, anything derived from the mind of Marcel Pagnol has delighted me. His books are as wonderful as the films, imho.

Have you had a chance to see the (unfortunately) non-musical Fanny (1960) with Leslie Caron, CCfan?

For anyone interested, some of the other best known films based on Marcel Pagnol's plays and books are:
Topaze (1933) with John Barrymore, Jean de Florette & Manon of the Spring (1986) with Gerard Depardieu & Yves Montand, and Le Château de Ma Mère (1990) or La Gloire de Mon Père(1990).
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Post by charliechaplinfan »

No, I haven't had chance to see Fanny with Leslie Caron, I thought it was a musical because of Leslie, my mistake.

I've seen Topaze, Jean de Florette and Manon Des Sources and enjoyed them all. I've never seen La Chateau De Ma Mare or Le Gloire De Mon Pere but I will look out for them :D
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Post by moira finnie »

CCfan,
I think you'd love both La Chateau De Ma Mare or Le Gloire De Mon Pere if you like the Fanny Trilogy. The book's are great reads too. No need to be sorry about Fanny (1960) not being a musical. It should have been one.
I saw the trailer for Fanny last night when I was watching the Sophia Loren flicks on TCM. I was struck by how beautiful and contemporary Leslie Caron looked. She really looked prettier with longer hair.-sandykaypax

I thought she looked more relaxed in this film than I ever recall her being in most American produced movies. Maybe it helped to be on her home turf and acting with so many of her countrymen. Btw, at 12:30am, Sunday, June 8th, The L-Shaped Room (1962), which features one of a mature Leslie Caron's best performances is being broadcast on TCM. I haven't seen it in some time, but hope that it is still as effectively moving as it once was.
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Post by charliechaplinfan »

I watched the L-Shaped Room last year. It's a gritty British black and white movie with the lovely Leslie Caron as a young girl alone in London (apart from the bun in the oven). She gives a sensitive performance, it's worth a peek.
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Post by knitwit45 »

I just watched Fanny, and I'm still in the midst of it's spell. Can anyone tell me, was it faithful to the original book, or was it tampered with? And what happened to Horst Bucholtz? He was never one of my favorite actors, he always seemed on the edge of hysteria, but in Fanny, he was so good as the conflicted young man in love.
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Post by moira finnie »

knitwit45 wrote:I just watched Fanny, and I'm still in the midst of it's spell.
Hi Nancy,
"Spell" is a great way to describe the beguiling romanticism of Fanny (1960). I loved the way that Rose MacGowan after the movie described the film "as looking at small lives in a big way" and without overdramatizing them, empathizing with each of the characters, recognizing their intrinsic, individual value. In the past few months, I've seen this movie 3 times now, and have savored every moment, (and I don't feel that way about many movies). Can't wait to get it on dvd.
Can anyone tell me, was it faithful to the original book, or was it tampered with?
The 1960 film, based on Marcel Pagnol's trilogy & the musical, was compressed and details about several characters, i.e. Cesar (Charles Boyer), were somewhat truncated, but the essence of each of the figures, imho, was still there. Btw, the Pagnol films are available on dvd and are wonderful as well, though not as glossy as the Logan film.
knitwit45 wrote:And what happened to Horst Bucholtz? He was never one of my favorite actors, he always seemed on the edge of hysteria, but in Fanny, he was so good as the conflicted young man in love.
Here's an article from the NYTimes on Dec. 28, 2003 reflecting on Horst Buchholz after his death in March of that year:
December 28, 2003
THE LIVES THEY LIVED; The German James Dean
By ANTHONY GIARDINA

Horst Buchholz b. 1933
Wars don't end when the last shot is fired or a treaty signed. They end when the movies tell us they've ended. Thus, World War II in Europe, which seemed to end in 1945, actually lingered for another 15 years, until the moment in 1960 when ''The Magnificent Seven'' opened. Or let's be more precise: until the moment Horst Buchholz, the young German actor hired to support Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen in that film, first flashed his enormously appealing smile.

In the 15 years between the end of the fighting and the opening of ''The Magnificent Seven,'' Germans had been many things in the popular consciousness: reprehensible, villainous, beyond the pale. What they had never been in those years was cool. That was what Horst Buchholz was, playing Chico (''the kid'') with the sort of scene-stealing bravado that made every kid in America want to be him. In those pre-video-game days of 1960, the favorite pastime of little boys was to emulate the cowboys they saw on TV and at the movies. Listen hard to the sound coming off the playgrounds and hilltops of suburban America in that year, and you could hear boys fighting over who got to be Horst. And in the way of such things, a whole new attitude toward a much maligned country was being formed.

He had come to America in the late 50's, touted as the German James Dean, appearing on Broadway with Kim Stanley. But his significant work was done in the movies. He followed ''The Magnificent Seven'' with Billy Wilder's ''One, Two, Three.'' James Cagney is the star of that movie, playing an American Coca-Cola executive spreading what the movie calls ''Coca-Cola colonialism'' in a divided Berlin. Buchholz plays his nemesis, a young East Berlin Communist who has seduced, eloped with and impregnated the daughter of Cagney's superior, the girl Cagney was supposed to be keeping a watchful eye on. The subsequent battle between an aging, puffy-looking Cagney and the astonishingly handsome young German star is about raw sex versus globalization, political idealism versus the hard-nosed truths of American capitalism.

It's a battle Cagney has to win, but his victory feels hollow, a holding action against the inevitable future. Even Buchholz's sweater possesses an eloquence in that movie -- overlarge, ratty in a Greenwich Village-Harvard Yard sort of way. It, and the angle of his hat, speak volumes about the hip, new German stance he embodied. That stance conjoined very neatly with an attitude already brewing in the early 60's on American campuses, one that would flower in a few years and make America, not Germany, the subject of young people's scorn. It was maybe not appropriate to suggest playing ''One, Two, Three'' on the playgrounds and hills of suburban America. Still, you wanted to be that guy.

And then, having done his work, Buchholz started to fade. He went on for a few years being an international star. Played Marco Polo. Played Gandhi's assassin in ''Nine Hours to Rama.'' But his particular moment was over. When he next surfaced importantly, it was more than 30 years later, in ''Life Is Beautiful,'' as the doctor whose obsession with puzzles blinds him to his ability to help Roberto Benigni in the concentration camp. Though he looked great, Buchholz playing the ''good,'' impotent German felt like a sad accommodation to the tired ideas and warmed-over humanism in which movies traffic these days, a far cry from the slash-and-burn methods by which he had once changed our attitudes toward a whole country. He had done that, pure and simple, by being young and sexy, and by wearing his hat a certain way. That's how historical possibilities emerge, by such small, certain gestures. When John Kennedy made his ''Ich bin ein Berliner'' speech in 1963, some of us, the smart little boys of that year, thought of the president as a kind of Johnny-come-lately. Berlin? Check out the hills and the playgrounds. We'd been there already.
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Post by knitwit45 »

Thanks, Moira, I knew you'd be able to shed light on all my questions.
I know it sounds silly, but I'm still experiencing "aftershocks"!!! Movies used to do that to me, and I've missed it. Nothing today affects me like this, there's always a spurt of violence or gore to deaden the senses. I actually expected some dire event to take place while watching Fanny. What a lovely UN-surprise to watch this movie about "small lives' experienced in a quiet, very moving way.
"Life is not the way it's supposed to be.. It's the way it is..
The way we cope with it, is what makes the difference." ~ Virginia Satir
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Post by charliechaplinfan »

Moira and Nancy,you've both sold Fanny to me. I'm off to put it on my wishlist.

Nancy I've just fallen in love with The Fanny trilogy filmed in the early thirties. The feelings you describe on watching Fanny is exactly how I felt watching the trilogy.
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Post by knitwit45 »

How funny! I was just re-reading your post about the trilogy! I would love to see those 3 films. Are they in a set, or did you purchase separately? I think it's time to renew my membership to Netflix.

Nancy
"Life is not the way it's supposed to be.. It's the way it is..
The way we cope with it, is what makes the difference." ~ Virginia Satir
""Most people pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it." ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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