Can-Can ***½ (1959, Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan) – Classic Movie Review 2179

Director Walter Lang’s 1960 musical stars Frank Sinatra as a French attorney called François Durnais who talks his old judge buddy Paul Barriere (Maurice Chevalier) into trying to stop the gendarmes closing his girlfriend Simone Pistache (Shirley MacLaine)’s sexy can-can dancing bar and night club in 1896, Montmartre.

But young ambitious judge Philippe Forrestier (Louis Jourdan) tries to put a spoke in the wheels by enforcing the official ban on can-can, getting the club closed and coming between the lovers. So then Simone sets out to manipulate Philippe, too, making François jealous.

This sort of follow-up to 1958’s hit Gigi, with two of its stars in Jourdan and Chevalier in similar roles, is a pleasant if unspectacular film of Cole Porter’s attractive musical of 1890s Paris. The songs (many from Porter’s other shows) are still evergreen show tune gems: ‘I Love Paris’, ‘Let’s Do It’, ‘You Do Something to Me’, ‘C’Est Magnifique’ and ‘Just One of those Things’. And Nelson Riddle’s Oscar-nominated scoring is expectedly classy too.

A first-class, iconic cast stroll amiably through the movie, though Sinatra seems cool and laid-back to the point of being nearly uninvolved and, of course, he is breathtakingly un-French. But the charm of the true Frenchmen Jourdan and Chevalier, the young MacLaine’s pert cuteness, Juliet Prowse’s attractive dancing, Hermes Pan’s choreography and Irene Sharaff’s Oscar-nominated costumes see it through to considerable success.

It’s a shame that Lang’s direction is plodding and uninspired and that the overlong (134 minutes) movie’s pacing is listless. And if, thanks mainly to Dorothy Kingsley and Charles Lederer’s plodding script, adapting a reasonably smart original by Abe Burrows, this lavish, handsome-looking production doesn’t quite work smoothly, it’s just one of those things.

Also in the cast are Marcel Dalio, Leon Belasco, Nestor Paiva, John A Neris, Jean Del Val, Eugene Borden, Jonathan Kidd, Ann Codee, Marc Wilder and Lili Valenty.

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 famously starred in Gigi with Lesley Caron and played the smooth villain Khan in the James Bond movie Octopussy.

© Derek Winnert 2015 – Classic Movie Review 2179

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com/