Cyrano and d'Artagnan

1964 film

25 September 1964 (1964-09-25) (NYFF)
22 October 1964 (1964-10-22)

Running time

145 minutesCountryFranceLanguageFrench

Cyrano and d'Artagnan (French: Cyrano et d'Artagnan) is a 1964 French adventure film directed by Abel Gance, starring José Ferrer and Jean-Pierre Cassel. It is set in 1642 and tells the story of how the poet and duelist Cyrano de Bergerac teams up with the musketeer d'Artagnan in order to stop a plot against king Louis XIII. The film draws from Edmond Rostand's 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac and Alexandre Dumas' three-volume novel d'Artagnan Romances.^[1] Ferrer repeated his role from the 1950 film Cyrano de Bergerac. Cyrano and d'Artagnan had 651,213 admissions in France.^[2]

It was the last cinema film directed by Gance, his final works the television films Marie Tudor and Valmy.

Cast

José Ferrer as Cyrano de Bergerac
Jean-Pierre Cassel as d'Artagnan
Sylva Koscina as Ninon de l'Eclos
Daliah Lavi as Marion de l'Orme
Rafael Rivelles as Cardinal Duc de Richelieu
Laura Valenzuela as queen Anne of Austria
Julián Mateos as Marquis de Cinq-Mars
Michel Simon as the old guard
Philippe Noiret as king Louis XIII
Gabrielle Dorziat as Mme de Mauvières
Ivo Garrani as Laubardemont

Reception

Eugene Archer of The New York Times reviewed the film: "Judging strictly by the title, Cyrano and D'Artagnan does not sound a bit more promising than Samson Meets Hercules. Strange to say, despite the auspices of the New York Film Festival and the reputation of the 75-year-old director, Abel Gance, there is really not much difference between the Cyrano epic and the kind of dubbed Italian spectacle usually inflicted on us by Joseph E. Levine." The critic continued: "José Ferrer, repeating his Oscar-winning Cyrano role 14 years later, gives a flat and clumsy performance, while Jean-Pierre Cassel's D'Artagnan is swaggering and singularly lacking in charm. ... Let it be said for the director, known mainly for a silent triple-screen Napoleon in the nineteen-twenties, that he displays a nice eye for color. Otherwise, his handling of a routine commercial assignment is just that—routine."^[3]

References

^ "Cyrano et d'Artagnan". bifi.fr (in French). Cinémathèque Française. Retrieved 23 May 2015.
^ "Cyrano et d'Artagnan". AlloCiné (in French). Retrieved 23 May 2015.
^ Archer, Eugene (26 September 1964). "Cyrano et d Artagnan (1962): A Swashbuckler". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 25 March 2016. Retrieved 23 May 2015.