The Cine Technician (1953-1956)

March-April, 1952 THE CINE-TECHNICIAN 39 the theme of beauty pursued by quick-witted ugliness and tongue-tied comeliness. This tender theme was revived by Edmcnd Rostand, who combined the deeds and facial promontories of Cyrano and the vaudeville Roquelaure in an eccentric paladin whose flaming spirit is burlesqued by a blazing carbuncle of a nose. Of course, any realistic physiognomist could have warned Rostand against misinterpreting the nose as an obstacle to love. For ages, amplitude in that member had betokened sexual grace, as well as fieriness, satire, and aggressiveness. That it could serve as a measuring stick of potency v/as revealed in the medieval Secreta Secretorum: " Tho that have grete Noosys . . . bene desposyd to concupiscence." Old Bruscambille's robust faith was, " O happy indeed are those who have a half foot of nose!" And are we not told that " the Shandy family ranked very high in King Harry the Eighth's time " because of its " long and jolly noses "? Even Helene de Solanges, the young widow in the French vaudeville, had coyly admitted that she could love Roquelaure in spite of his flourishing nose. " The Man with a Nose " in a sketch by H. G. Wells, antedating Cyrano by almost three years, laments that " a bit of primordial chaos clapped to his face " has incapacitated him for " the business of life " : " What woman could overlook a nose like mine " or " shut out her visions of . . . its immensity?" But no gross overtones linger in Rostand's play, whose sentimental-romantic handling of the nose does not call the blood to a maiden's cheek. Once the playwright's task was ended, actors and make-up artists began deciding what they could possibly do with Cyrano's knob. The first to meet the challenge was Constant Coquelin, who at fifty-six achieved his greatest success counterfeiting an active swordsman who died at thirty-six. Although Coquelin at times looked like a pursy notary in too-energetic masquerade, his voice bounced resonantly from its pendulous sounding board. So moving was the performance that Rostand exclaimed, " Cyrano's spirit . . . has passed into you." But Coquelin's nose was little more than avant-garde. At the ComedieFrangaise, Andre Brunot was later to turn Cyrano into a wide-eyed fop, whose nasal proliferation stopped at a gristly point. French restraint ended, however, when the celebrated nose was exported. In England, Charles Wyndham burdened himself with an inflated hawk's beak, and Robert Loraine resembled a Mephistopheles on whose nose a handsome dividend of dough had been declared. Coquelin's augmentations had been commemorated by a painter; Loraine's nasal symmetry was perpetuated in sculpture. And only a few years ago, Sir Ralph Richardson brought to the New Theatre a frontal creation which descended in two cascades over a naive and melancholy mouth. Actors in America have really gone to town with Cyrano's protuberance. Richard Mansfield managed to look pretty much like the gloomy and heroic Karl von Moor in Schiller's The Robbsrs. On the Mansfield nose some unsung wielder of the trowel erected a superstructure of putty or plaster of Paris. Walter Hampden stalked through a thousand performances with a nose which fluctuated all the way from a mighty wedge to an untrimmed brierroot resembling nothing so much as a fungus on a spree. Unpredictable as this counterweight might be, Hampden was invariably the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance whose Sancho Panza had been pulped against his face. Only a man with Jose Ferrer's background could hope to surpass the previous concoctions of dressing rooms and laboratories. The value of noses may have first impressed Ferrer when he repeated Iago's lines, " The Moor . . . will as tenderly be led by the nose as asses are." Soon he was gasconading through the part of Cyrano on the legitimate stage: "A big nose is indicative of a soul affable, and kind, and courteous, liberal, brave, just like myself." Arriving in Hollywood, Ferrer drew up specifications of a nose which would be as adamantine as the Rock of Gibraltar, as lofty as the Peak of Tenerife, and on its shoulders he hung twin moons resembling dilated, dreamily fixed eyes. And to counter-balance this boom, this flying buttress, this roost for homeless condors, he developed the nervous agility of a tightrope walker who respects the relentless laws of gravitation. For a time it was feared that Jose's nose might become an ice-capped and uncharted menace to aviation, but an allwise Providence has reduced this Eighth Wonder of the Celluloid World to a horizontal position. Says an old proverb, "An inch on a man's nose is much." Given an inch, Jose Ferrer has certainly taken an ell. Yet, unsatisfied with this territorial conquest, certain critics have lamented that Cyrano's peninsula was not floodlit by Technicolor. Cyrano must outshine Bardolph, whose beacon Falstaff likened to " an ignis fatuus or a ball of wildfire," a " a lantern in the poop," and Dives burning in his purple robes. Perhaps both actor and critics have lost sight of the fitness of things. Rostand's tormented hero exaggerates his nasal catastrophe, and out of this exaggeration come magnificence and misery. By making that catastrophe approximate Cyrano's description of it, Hollywood has reduced romantic tragicomedy to photographic realism. In translating the play on to the screen, a producer should grow familiar with Rostand, Coquelin, and the nose of Cyrano. There is both more and less in that nose than meets the eye.