The Cine Technician (1953-1956)

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THE CINE-TECHNICIAN March-April, 1952 CYRANO'S NOSE COLEMAN O. PARSONS, an assistant professor of English at the City College of New York, wrote this learned study of the theatre's most renowned nose for 'The Quarterly', and has given 'Cine' permission to reprint. Our thanks to the author and to the editors of 'The Quarterly'. FOR several weeks the drums of publicity throbbed out news of a cinematic experience "Awaited for More Than 50 Years," thirty-eightyear-old Jose Ferrer's appearance as the "Fabulous Hero! Famous Nose!" — CYRANO DE BERGERAC! Stories were released about Ferrer's trying on different noses until he found the one that matched his new personality. On what this personality could possibly be there was no wholehearted agreement. The actor himself dreamed of a dashing, virtuous, humorous, courageous, knightly oddity; the director, Michael Gordon, had mystic thoughts of beauty resident in spirit rather than in form; and the adapter, Carl Foreman, most modern of the trio, got involved in the conflicts and frustrations of an ugly individualist. Their technical adviser was Harold M. Holden, M.D., D.D.S., and Ph.D., author of a sprightly and painstaking work on a life-long hobby, Noses, and head of the Holden Clinic for Plastic Surgery. The doctor probably leaned toward the adapter's interpretation. Diagnostically, Cyrano de Bergerac's ills were nothing more than aesthetic inadequacy or human-fulfilment deficiency due to " a neurotic nose problem." For this there is only one specific — rhinoplasty. To intensify or decrease the soldier-poet's maladjustment, any competent rhinologist would either build his proboscis up or pare it down. Dr. Holden, as photographs show, built it up. An admiration for the foremost noseys, extending from Scipio Nasica and Publius Ovidius Naso to Cromwell, Frederick the Great, and " Schnozzola " Durante, has made me deeply concerned over recent developments. Through focusing its cameras almost exclusively on Cyrano and through making a physiological part dominate the whole man. Hollywood has allowed a celebrated nose to get out of hand. It is my purpose, by referring to life, literature, and stage lore, to put Cyrano's nose back in its proper place. In Cyrano's day, disciples of Gasparo Taglia cozzi and of Ambroise Pare were ready to give exuberant Nature a lesson in symmetry or to repair losses inflicted by bullet, duelling sword, or disease. They could trim flesh, engraft it, or fabricate substitutes of gold, silver, paper, and linen. The reason Cyrano did not call on these artisans may be discovered in old engravings. The author of comic histories of the sun and the moon possessed an ample, perhaps even a compendious nose, not a lusus naturae. This monstrous bantling was bestowed upon him by comic and satiric writers, and its growth was fostered by romantic biographers of the nineteenth century. While Cyrano's frontal organ was being manipulated to sub-continental proportions by sundry men of letters, the pathetic appendage of GastonJean-Baptiste, due de Roquelaure, suffered a mere remarkable sea change. Two years before Cyrano began his earthly strut, Roquelaure dared to appear in patrician France with a noseless face in which yawned two fearsome pits. Despite this handicap, he cultivated panache and was celebrated as a very god of raillery, practical jests, and — mirabile dictu — amorous stamina. As such he figured in The French Momus, or the Diverting Adventures of the Duke of Roquelaure. Thus Cyrano and Roquelaure, their escapades richly inlaid with legendry, survived for two centuries in the affections of their countrymen. Then the nineteenth century looked these hearties between the eyes and concluded that they must have suffered in love, the one through abundance, the other through deficiency, of nose. A parting of the ways came in 1836 with the writing of a vaudeville, Roquelaure, or the Ugliest Man in France. Failing to unearth a player who would suffer his nose to be planed dewn to fit the part, the three collaborators gave Roquelaure a devil of a nose instead and called him " Monsieur Grand-Nez." Being free from this embarrassment, the compilers of " curious histories " and " adventures " of the duke refused to abandon their hero's snub. Nor did these facetious hacks waste their talents on