The Madwoman of Chaillot Reviews

This is a review about the movie; Danny is only mentioned as one of the performers.

“‘Madwoman of Chaillot’, Fidelity For a Fantasy”
The New York Times – October 13, 1969
By: Vincent Canby

"THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT," presented originally on the Broadway stage in 1948 with Martita Hunt in the title role, has not aged with grace or charm—not, at least, according to Bryan Forbes's screen version that opened yesterday at the Plaza Theater.

Forbes, the director, and Edward Anhalt, the screenwriter, have been fairly faithful to Jean Giraudoux's fantasy about the dotty old countess who upsets a hideous plan to transform Paris into a giant oilfield—a kind of stylish Venice, Calif.—with derricks pumping petroleum in the Tuileries Gardens, on the Ile de la Cité and along the Champs Elysées. Such fidelity, as in love, is sometimes its own sort of madness, and when the film does depart from the original, it does so in all the wrong ways.

Anhalt has attempted to update the fairy tale that Giraudoux originally set "in the spring of next year." However, references to jet airplanes, antiballistic missile systems, student riots and de Gaulle's dreams of France as a glorious nuclear power have the reverse effect, placing the film in the summer of the year before last.

Then, too, there is the spectacle of Katharine Hepburn pretending to be the crazy old countess. At heart, of course, the madwoman is just as authoritative and no-nonsense a personality as Miss Hepburn, but she should mask her sanity behind a facade of dead-panned lunacy. Miss Hepburn's madwoman is as sentimental (and therefore, as redundant) as her mannerism of gently clenching her perfect teeth, looking into the middle distance and weeping through her tears.

Everything about the film is staggeringly, almost wastefully, high-class—the sets representing Parisian places and townhouses, the costumes (Miss Hepburn's Marie Antoinette hats use more feathers than Josephine Baker would have worn as entire gowns), the peppermint candy color photography by Claude Renoir and Burnett Guffey, and the all-star, international supporting cast.

Britain's Margaret Leighton and Edith Evans and Italy's Giulietta Masina, dressed in spectacular, rummage shop finery, play the other madwomen. Charles Boyer, Yul Brynner, Oscar Homolka, John Gavin and Donald Pleasence are the conspirators, the board members of International Substrate of Paris, Inc., that plans to make money and war, not love. And Danny Kaye, Claude Dauphin and Richard Chamberlain are the little people of Paris, the countess's eccentric friends who, to me, anyway, seem to represent (along with the countess) a form of populist fascism a good deal more frightening than the economic sort represented by International Substrate.

I doubt that Giraudoux, or his English adaptor, Maurice Valency, meant "The Madwoman" to be taken that seriously. However, because the film is so literal and so horizontal in structure (everything pictured is also said, everything said is repeated two or three times in terrible, pseudo-poetic soliloquies), the mind wanders to subsidiary considerations.

Even in its original, "The Madwoman of Chaillot" is a rather simplistic parable that dramatizes the triumph of good over evil, the efficacy of illusion, the virtue of individuality, the folly of war—in short, all those truisms that nobody except a true madman (or madwoman) could possibly deny. Anhalt has supplemented the original Giraudoux-Valency play with some new characters, including a greedy, apparently exiled American evangelist (Gavin), a young man with a Southern accent, whose presence in Paris is one of the film's genuine—if not especially intriguing—mysteries.

Forbes, who persists in making conventional films of unconventional properties ("Whistle Down The Wind," "The Wrong Box") moves his cameras around quite a lot, but there is really little he can do to hide the fact that "The Madwoman of Chaillot" is—as it was 20 years ago—an incredibly precious theatrical conceit, just the sort of thing somebody might think would make a great Broadway musical comedy. As we all know, it didn't.

- Home -