Cyrano et d’Artagnan (1964) - film review

1642.  The opposing political ambitions of Cardinal Richelieu and the Marquis de Cinq-Mars have brought about a rift between King Louis XIII and his queen.  To prevent a civil war, Cyrano de Bergerac is sent to deliver a vital message to Queen Anne of Austria.  On the road from his native Gascogne to Paris, he meets the ambitious swordsman D’Artagnan, who is also heading for Paris to make his fortune.  The two men strike up an immediate friendship and continue their journey together, unaware of the remarkable adventures that lie ahead.

And so ends the illustrious filmmaking career of Abel Gance, one of France’s most important cineastes.  His third colour feature, Cyrano et d’Artagnan was among his more ambitious productions, bringing together three great French literary works – Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Alexandre Dumas’s Les Trois Mousquetaires and Victor Hugo’s Marion Delorme – into one flamboyant swashbuckling epic.  Gance did make one further film after this, Bonaparte et la revolution (1971), but this was largely a re-edit of his earlier 1927 masterpiece Napoléon.

Whilst it is hard not to be impressed by the scale and sheer cinematographic beauty of Cyrano et d’Artagnan, it is a pretty taxing film, with a very high ennui quotient.  For a combination of budgetary and artistic reasons, Gance made use of foreign actors, including the American actor José Ferrer, who had previously played Cyrano de Bergerac in Michael Gordon’s 1950 adaptation of Rostand’s play (for which Ferrer won an Oscar).  Consequently, most of the dialogue is dubbed, rendering the film coldly static and artificial.  With lengthy dialogue exchanges and protracted action sequences, the film feels painfully slow in places, whilst some of Gance’s attempts to inject some originality – such as some experimental use of the camera - backfire horribly.  When it was first released, the film was torn to pieces by the critics and was a commercial disaster for its director, effectively ending his career.  It may not be Abel Gance’s best film, but Cyrano et d’Artagnan does have a certain charm, and it isn’t such a bad parting shot from a great auteur of French cinema.

© James Travers 2008

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