While the period swashbuckler Scaramouche (1952, George Sidney) is hardly radical in its take on the swords-and-puffy-shirts genre, it has enough stealthy surprises up its (puffy) sleeve to keep the viewer pleasantly off-balance.
The opening scenes, though distinguished by Sidney and his crew's handsome recreation of revolution-era France, contain the kind of flowery dialogue (penned by writers Ronald Millar and George Froeschel) and noble protestations of honor that lead one to worry that nothing more than the most generic period diversion imaginable lies ahead. You start to wonder if smelling salts will be necessary.
But a little under a half-hour in, the movie suddenly springs to life. That's when hero Andre Moreau (Stewart Granger), after being branded a traitor for his friendship with the author of a revolution-stoking pamphlet, hides from the authorities by dashing into a theatre and pretending to be the masked clown Scaramouche, and proves to be so skilled an amateur thespian that he decides to pursue a training-for-revenge-by-day/acting-by-night regimen. Sidney's injection of backstage farce, a form he pulled off with panache in his film version of Kiss Me Kate, into the basic mold of a swashbuckling adventure is entirely unexpected, and infuses the film with an infectious comedic spirit and a zesty unpredictability.
The movie just gets better and more involving from there, and I was startled at how invested I became in the central quartet of archetypal-by-nature characters. Granger, looking like a cross between Gaston from Disney's Beauty and the Beast and comedian Rob Riggle, plays Andre with booming-voiced gusto. Mel Ferrer is the spitting image of aristocratic sadism as his opposite number, the villainous Marquis de Maynes. As Aline, the Marquis de Maynes' ward, who is intensely smitten with Andre (though, unbeknownst to her, Andre is her bastard brother), Janet Leigh brings the right wide-eyed passion and kittenish innocence. But the most enjoyable performance is delivered by Eleanor Parker, who would invite comparisons with a firecracker even if she didn't have a giant, orange mane of hair, as Andre's actress girlfriend Lenore. Suspecting that Andre is spending his time away from the theatre cuddling up to Aline, when what he's really doing is perfecting his swordfighting technique, Lenore erupts in jealous rages that are almost action scenes unto themselves.
The paradox of Scaramouche is that it boasts some dazzlingly choreographed duels--including a stunning seven-minute-long climax that follows Andre and the Marquis de Maynes as they swordfight within the lobby and among the balconies of a grand opera house--but it would also work just fine as a film if all of its blade-clashing set pieces and horseback chase scenes were excised completely. The farcical romantic complications that beset the four main characters are so deftly written they would work just as well outside of a genre context.
For Scaramouche to go from being a tad stuffy in the early going to ultimately triumph as one of my great recent Turner Classic Movies discoveries is quite the impressive turnaround. Unlike, say, the fourth and most recent Pirates of the Caribbean adventure, it offers old-fashioned entertainment as concerned with the essentials of story and character as it is with showcasing feats of derring-do. Grade: A-
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