Gigi **** (1958, Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, Hermione Gingold) – Classic Movie Review 2178

Director Vincente Minnelli’s 1958 musical Gigi, with exactly the right stars in Leslie Caron, Louis Jourdan, Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold, was a huge hit and a surprise sensation at the Academy Awards. It is based on the novel by Colette and the play version by Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes).

In 1900 Paris, a rich lady Aunt Alicia (Isabel Jeans) teaches her teenage niece Gigi (Caron) the ways of the courtesan to be the mistress of the handsome and dashing Gaston (Jourdan). For a while the couple enjoy a platonic friendship, but the romantically inclined, tomboyish girl falls for him and decides to get married to him instead.

Visual stylists Minnelli and Cecil Beaton (the set and costume designer) adorn this nine-Oscar winning musical with a fussy, slightly musty elegance and an overdose of lavish, intricately woven detail.

But Caron is ideal as Colette’s feisty young heroine, Jourdan is impeccable in his most famous role as the debonair charmer rich playboy Gaston, while of the older generation, both Gingold as Gigi’ s grandmother and Chevalier as Jourdan’s father just ooze charisma as they rekindle their old love.

The catchy evergreen Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner songs include the evergreen classics ‘Gigi’, ‘I Remember it Well’, ‘The Night they Invented Champagne’ and ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls’, all providing lots of pleasure.

Despite the movie’s staid conservatism and over-production, this last big MGM musical of the Fifties, made when they had already gone out of fashion, is still utterly delightful. The nine Oscars were for: best film (producer Arthur Freed), director, cinematography (Joseph Ruttenberg, Ray June), screenplay (Alan Jay Lerner), designs, scoring (André Previn), editing, song ‘Gigi’, plus an honorary lifetime award for Chevalier.

Gigi has also in the cast Eva Gabor, John Abbott, Monique Van Vooren, Lydia Stevens, Edwin Jerome, Dorothy Neumann, Marilyn Sims, Richard Bean and Pat Sheahan.

Louis Jourdan, the debonair French leading man who was brought to Hollywood by producer David O Selznick in 1947 to appear in Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case, died on February 14 2015, aged 93. He starred as the smooth villain Khan in the James Bond movie Octopussy.

© Derek Winnert 2015 – Classic Movie Review 2178

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