Review: Gigi

Movies like Gigi remind me of cotton candy. It looks so good, but when I take a bite, it all dissolves into a sweet taste –and nothing else. And yet Gigi won nine Academy Awards -- for best picture, best director, and best screenplay adaptation as well as art direction, costume, best cinematography, best film editing, best score and best song--making it one of the all time top winners.

Go figure.

Only four movies, Ben Hur, Titantic, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,"and West Side Story,"won more than 9 awards and only two others won 9 – The Last Emperor and The English Patient. Of these only three made it onto AFI's top 100 list, West Side Story, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and Ben Hur which squeaked in at number 100. One can argue about the placement of movies on these lists and cite other movies that should have made it, but no one can seriously argue that Gigi belongs there. Gigi didn't even make the AFI list of the twenty-five best musicals.

But maybe there weren't any other choices that year.

Actually, no, there were quite a few. The nominations for best actor and actress tell the tale: both Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier for The Defiant Ones, Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, David Niven and Deborah Kerr for Separate Tables, Spencer Tracy for The Old Man and the Sea, Rosalind Russell for Auntie Mame, Susan Hayward for I Want to Live, Shirley MacClaine for Some Came Running. The list sounds like a roll call of some of the best actors of the fifties. Vertigo which is listed as number 9 on the most recent AFI list of top 100 movies was nominated for Art Direction and Sound. And didn't win.

Another of my personal favorites, Bell, Book and Candle, came out that year, as did South Pacific. I know BB&C is fluff, but most of the others are not. And personally, I liked both the love stories better than I liked the one in Gigi. I like my romantic leads old enough to know what they are doing.

Even Auntie Mame is a lot of things, but fluff isn't one of them.

I think South Pacific is a far better musical. There are a number of memorable songs that are actually singable and a meatier story. The characters have actual conflicts both external and internal. I know that it is hard for people who weren't alive in the fifties to imagine the depth of prejudice of that time. Nellie Forbush, a naïve nurse from Arkansas, has all the unexamined prejudices of her background. Against the backdrop of the War in the Pacific, she is forced to come to grips with what she has been taught. Meanwhile the interracial love story between the white lieutenant and the native girl was a shocker ---in that day. There are problems in the way the movie was filmed, but none in the music or the story.

Damn Yankees from that year isn't a great musical, but I still like it.

The score of Gigi is lovely. The set and costumes are also lovely, but lovely trappings do not a best picture make. See the above comment on cotton candy.

It is noticeable that none of the actors were even nominated for an award. Maurice Chevalier was given a consolation prize, an honorary award for his contributions to the world of entertainment for the last fifty years. His rendition of "Thank heaven for Little Girls" is a classic of the movie musical. But even the academy couldn't nominate the cast for acting. One song does not a great musical make and neither does a great score.

The plot of Gigi is simple: Louis Jourdan is a very rich man who is bored with life, including his mistress, Eva Gabor, of whom we don't see enough. H e only has fun when he is visiting Hermione Gingold and her adolescent granddaughter, Leslie Caron. Can you see where this is going?

Gingold, by the way, is Jourdan's uncle, Maurice Chevalier's, ex-mistress. She is referred to as an "old family friend." Not too many families have old friends like that.

After we have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that Jourdan has fun with his little family friend, he goes off on a trip. This gets him out of the way so that Gingold's scheming sister, Alicia, played by Isobel Jeans, (best performance in the movie, in my humble opinion) can complete Caron's education in courtesanship. Of course, when Jourdan sees the result, he is very angry but decides that if being a courtesan is Caron's fate, he might as well be first in line. She rejects him, of course, but changes her mind – of course. They get all dressed up – did I mention that the costumes are wonderful? – and go out to dinner. Then, Jourdan sees Caron's innocent beauty among all the soiled doves and drags her out of there. He decides to marry her, and they all live happily ever after.

Gee, where does Hollywood get its plots?

A question: if Jourdan is Chevalier's nephew and Chevalier has an affair with Gingold – the song "I Remember it Well" makes that explicitly clear – are Jourdan and Caron cousins?

By the way, I liked the duet, "I Remember It Well" much better than "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" which always verged on pedophilia to me.

Leslie Caron trained as a dancer. Even though she doesn't do enough dancing in this film her training is evident in the way she portrays a very awkward teenaged Gigi. It takes real ability to be the opposite of what you really are, very graceful in this case. It takes a really good poet to write really bad poetry. Lots of people can write bad poetry and many do, but memorably bad poetry takes near genius. Just like William S. Gilbert in Patience. The same goes for the lounge singer, played by Jimmy Nail, in Evita. I think he was a better singer that the character, so he sang it as the character.

Mind you, I thought the restaurant scenes were very effectively staged. But as I said, it all doesn't add up to a best picture.

So why did it win an Oscar? Second guessing the Academy is the critic's favorite indoor sport, but I have a couple of ideas. There were so many good films that year that they cancelled each other out. They split the vote so badly that a mediocre film slipped in. Maybe they just wanted to honor Vincent Minnelli (who should be castigated for just phoned it in on Kismet.*) One book on the Academy Awards instructs those who want to bet on the outcome to look for the film with the biggest cast and crew who will all vote for their film. (I can think of several winners this might apply to.) My guess is some combination of the above. As far as I can recall, the other movies didn't have large crews, but Gig did. It took a lot of people to make all those costumes and all those sets. Add that to people who didn't want to make a choice so decided to honor Minelli and there you have it.

*In terms of great music, Kismet could be right up there with West Side Story, An American in Paris, and Showboat, but the film is too poorly done to make anyone's greatest list.