Tour de Tour

Fanny (Joshua Logan; Warners) is a waif who has knocked around for almost as long as Little Orphan Annie; the difference is that now and then she changes her dress. French Filmmaker Marcel Pagnol

(The Baker's Wife, The Well-Digger's Daughter) first told his sentimental fable of the Marseilles waterfront as a trio of plays, then as a charming film trilogy in the early 19305. Theatergoers will remember with no leap of the heart that by 1954 Fanny had become an overweight Broadway musical. Inexplicably encouraged, Director Josh Logan set about making a new screen version, having prudently purchased the assurance that Pagnol's trilogy would not be shown concurrently in the U.S.

There is a good deal to be said for Logan's second try, all of it in praise of a couple of fraternally rancorous old goats, Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer. Chevalier plays Panisse, who marries the pregnant Fanny (Leslie Caron) after her sea-struck lover, Marius (Horst Buch-holz), jilts her for a square-rigger. Boyer plays Marius' father, Cesar. They are vast bladders of honor, mountains of wrath, vestfuls of selfesteem, and it is a great pleasure to watch them cheat each other at cards or craftily set a derby hat in the street and wait for a sucker to break his toe on the brick inside. Each plays the fool well, and each also accomplishes the difficult trick of playing the wise man--Chevalier when he tells his young wife of an old man's love, and Boyer when he explains to Marius that the child Marius fathered now belongs rightfully to Panisse.

Fanny is supposed to be a wry, slender legend, and in the interest of slenderness Director Logan did not film his story as a musical: he retained Harold Rome's buttery score only as background music. But Fanny never makes the weight: all chance for the love story to be intimate and believable is lost at the outset. Part of the trouble is that the color camera is an awkward renderer of wry legends; it is a sousaphone, not a lyre. Another part is on-location filming--Logan paid too much attention to the location. As the movie begins, the camera swoops down for an aerial view of the blue, cluttered, ever-so-quaint Marseilles harbor. From that point the viewer is a tourist, charmed by the view, worried about losing his traveler's checks, and naggingly certain that he will never be allowed to see what the natives are really like. It is unfair to Actors Caron and Buchholz, who are pleasant people, but lovingly photographed docks, boats, fish stalls and bit players make it difficult to pay attention to their romance. The viewer's first thought as he leaves is not of the bittersweet ambience of love but of his wristwatch: Does he have time to reach American Express before it closes, to pick up his mail and get some more francs?

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