Note: Turner Rep is a recurring feature, appearing several times throughout the month and devoted to highlights from the Turner Classics' schedule for the month. Why? Simple. Because Turner Classics remains a veritible college education in film.
Today: Joshua Logan's "Fanny" (1961), being televised on TCM's "The Essentials," at 8 p.m. (est) on Saturday, June 7th, with a discussion by Robert Osborne and Rose McGowan.
The late Joshua Logan, who came to film from the stage, could hardly be considered one of the darlings of movie critics. Never one to go along with the crowd, I've always rather enjoyed his work, particularly his films based on plays - "Picnic," "Bus Stop," "Tall Story" and "Camelot."
Arguably, his best movie was 1961's "Fanny," based on the acclaimed Harold Rome stage musical of the same title, which Logan directed on Broadway in 1954 - and which, of course, was itself based on the extraordinary Marcel Pagnol stage-and-film trilogy, "Marius"/"Fanny"/"César."
For his film version, Logan went with a songless story, relegating Rome's great score to the background and this curious decision remains one of the unexplained mysteries of the cinema, particularly as Logan had a history with the material.
Considering the musical backgrounds of two of its stars, Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier, there's a possibility that "Fanny" started out as a film musical and that the decision to excise Rome's songs was a last-minute one. It's difficult to believe that Jack Warner would hire the stars from "Gigi" and not star them in a musical. The film's showing on TCM coincides with "Fanny's" inaugural release on DVD. Too bad as Logan isn't around to explain his reasons for eschewing the songs on the disc's commentary. We'll never know.
Pagnol's sweet, simplistic plot, set in the port of Marseilles in the 1930's, deals with Marius (played by Horst Buchholz, who had a good year in 1961, also making Billy Wilder's "One, Two, Three"), a restless dreamer weary of taking orders from his cafe-proprietor father, César (Charles Boyer) and longing to be a seafaring adventurer. On the eve of his departure, Marius impregnates his girlfriend, Fanny (Caron).
Her predicament is solved when the elderly, wealthy Panisse (Chevalier), a friend of César's, agrees to marry her.
There are many memorable moments in "Fanny," the most indelible for me involving a conversation between Boyer and Chevalier, who is on his deathbed in the scene. Boyer asks Chevalier what he'll miss the most about life, and one of the things that Chevalier comes up with is ... "lunch."
"Fanny" certainly wasn't the only stage musical to lose its songs as a film. Two years later, in 1963, Billy Wilder made a songless version of "Irma La Douce" (using Marguerite Monnot's original score for the background; lyrics by Alexandre Breford); "Hazel Flagg" was made into the 1954 Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis pseudo-musical, "Living It Up," retaining most of Ben Hecht's stage script (albeit changing the sex of the lead character) but only a few of the Jule Styne-Bob Hilliard score, and "Whoop-Up!" became the 1968 Elvis Presley vehicle, Peter Tewkesbury's "Stay Away, Joe," minus all of the Moose Charlap-Norman Gimble stage songs. Elvis used his own.
For the record, "Fanny" was one of the five films nominated for best picture of 1961. The others were J. Lee Thompson's "The Guns of Navarone," Robert Rosen's "The Hustler," Stanley Kramer's "Judgment at Nuremberg" and, of course, Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins' "West Side Story." "Fanny" was also nominated for William Reynolds' editing, Jack Cardiff's cinematography and Morris Stoloff's orchestrations of Rome's score. Boyer was nominated as best actor.
Note in Passing: "Fanny" marked another one of Caron's title-role characters, following "Lili," "Gaby" and "Gigi."
(Artwork: poster art for both the stage and film versions of Harold Rome's "Fanny"; Rose McGowan, Robert Osborne's co-host on TCM's "The Essentials")
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