Die Irre von Chaillot

The first hour of this film amazed me, it's a visual treat, especially the cafe scenes with Brynner, Pleasance et al talking weird, and Chamberlain and the whacky bomb-plot; towards the end it does tend to get a little bogged down in meaningfulness, the trial scene loses some impact from being overindulgent, but overall the Madwoman is a fascinating look at sixties idealism with eye opening performances from some top stars and enough zany weirdness in the script to keep a David Lynch fan happy. Well worth a look, in my book.

A wonderful fable I happened to stumble across. The inimitable Katharine Hepburn as the title character conspires with other eccentrics to save Paris. Warm, funny, delightfully non-sequitur and deeply poignant, this film has messages about love, greed, happiness, fear, hope, dreams. . .life. Excellent performances by all, including some wonderful dramatic acting by Danny Kaye. I highly recommend this movie.

There is a segment within a scene almost ending the first act of "The Madwoman of Chaillot", that suggest the direction the story is going to take. While the fanciful old countess Aurelia (Katharine Hepburn) explains young Roderick (Richard Chamberlain) the joys of being alive, the visuals turn to a slightly hazy retrospection of her love life, in which Roderick is seen as her mustachioed lover Alphonse, and the waitress Irma (Nanette Newman), with whom Roderick will fall in love, is seen as Aurelia when she was younger. All this theatricality is followed by a brief scene that ends the act, in which Irma delivers a soliloquy about her growing love for Roderick. Then after a fascinating first hour in which the plot is so startlingly current, as act two starts, we enter the world of filmed theater and the movie hardly recovers. If "The Madwoman of Chaillot" is remembered with affection after it ends, it is because of its first part, in which a rich and ruthless self-made man who leads a group that includes a general, a Catholic priest, a broker and a communist commissar, joins a similarly cruel prospector whose plan is the creation of an enterprise to dig up oil in the middle of historical Paris. The prospector has sent his nephew Roderick to put a bomb in the Palais de Chaillot to kill a public officer who denies him permission to begin his oil operation. But when Roderick fails and the police believe he is going to commit suicide, he meets countess Aurelia, who hears about the plan and decides to solve it by herself. Then action slows down, everything is done in interiors and the situation is resolved in strange ways -- first with a metaphorical trial which is pure stage material, and then with a certainly weird "execution" of the villains. By 1969 director Bryan Forbes was riding the crest of his own international film wave and had a great cast, in which even John Gavin delivered a fine funny performance of an evil priest. Masina is a delight, Evans is wonderful, and Homolka, Leighton, Henreid, Boyer and Dauphin are as good as all the supporting players, while Hepburn tries hard with her teary eyes... I could not help thinking what this would have been with a French actress in the lead.

It all depends how you approach this film. DO NOT expect a linear plot line, either by story or history. Do not expect it to explain itself for, like 2001, it leaves more questions open than it answers. This is a truly odd duck of a film and once you open up to what it SAYS about life and liberty, you can appreciate it. I disliked it at first view a long time ago and for the obvious reasons - the plot is a pencil sketch of the first order. King Arthur whacking limbs off the Black Knight makes more sense. But scrap that and listen to what the actors are SAYING about life and liberty and THEN it makes sense, for this is an allegory of a film. The closest I can find elsewhere is OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR which uses allegory just as well. Danny Kaye is always a treat, but Hepburn is in glorious 1913 costumes and owns the show, and remember this is 1969. The same year as THE LION IN WINTER for an entirely different performance. So you have to junk many standard film rules aside and THEN you will find this a very good treat of film. Have it with good French Bordeaux and cheese too. Then go outside and see if you can smell a cafe in Paris serving their unique nuclear coffee. Who knows? You may wind up there too.

Question: In 1943 what movie starred Katherine Hepburn, Katherine Cornell, and Harpo Marx?

ANSWER: STAGE DOOR CANTEEN

Question: In 1969 what movie starred Katherine Hepburn, Dame Edith Evans, and Danny Kaye?

ANSWER: THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT

Odd that Kate Hepburn should pop up in two unfair trivia questions, but it does happen. Actors do run into each other in all kinds of films, both good and bad, memorable and forgettable, and regular or short film (look at a comic short called THE STOLEN JOOLES which has most of the stars of Hollywood in the 1930s in it).

STAGE DOOR CANTEEN was done for patriotic morale boosting for our soldiers, and it celebrated the canteens used to entertain our men on furlough. So the making of that film had a reason that transcends it's current obscurity. I might add, as it is the only major movie that stage star Katherine Cornell popped up in for just a few minutes, it is worth it as a time capsule as such.

But THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT was based on a Giraudoux play about modern society endangered by the forces of power and greed. It is about the discovery that the city of light, Paris, is reposing on a huge, untapped oil field, and that various power figures without any soul (Yul Brynner, Charles Boyer, Paul Henried, Oscar Holmolka, Donald Pleasance) may be able to empty the city of it's neighborhoods, it's citizens, it's life and light, and replace it with derricks. Giraudoux made sure that the villains represent everything that he suspects. Brynner is the ultimate ruthless billionaire (he is upset when a waiter accidentally spills water on him). Boyer is a stock broker. Henried is a General. Homolka is the French head of the Communist Party (Giraudoux has no illusions about what a political label means - there are power mad people in all political parties). Pleasance is a prospector for oil. There is also John Gavin as a right wing religious demagogue.

Opposed to these villains are Kate Hepburn (the leading local social figure from the past - called "the madwoman of Chaillot") and her friends Giulietta Massina, Margaret Leighton, and Edith Evans (who is still trying to campaign in 1969 for Mr. Wilson's League of Nations). Also aiding Hepburn are the "rag picker" (Danny Kaye - in the best dramatic performance in a major motion picture in his career - also his only Oscar nomination), Richard Chamberlain, Gordon Heath, and Nanette Newman. Although Hepburn, Massina, Leighton, and Evans have social position, none have the political clout of the villains. So when they are made aware of the threat to their beloved Paris (and by extension western culture and morality) they hold a trial (in absentia) of the villains, and find these villains have to die.

This film is better for the brief vignettes of it's stars than for the total impact. Brynner's malevolent, general ruthlessness is one of his best acting jobs. So is Henried's almost comical criminal activity: he confesses to having arranged the murder of four promising young aides of his, because he suspected one of them (but not knowing which) of sleeping with his wife - it turned out his wife had been faithful after all (Brynner, Boyer, Homolka, and Gavin congratulate him on his luck!). Kaye has several great set pieces - a rag picker he wraps eloquent about the great, glory days of garbage in the past where each neighborhood's garbage had a special character all it's own (as opposed to the garbage of the modern homogenized neighborhoods of Paris, that those villains forced on the citizens). He is superb in the scene where he is the "defense" counsel for Brynner and his group - demoniacally showing what these people are really like while "defending" them. All those comic, scatterbrained, sequences in his movies built up to these scenes of poetry and passion.

Hepburn, of course, was great - that last sequence where she mistakes Chamberlain for the lost love of her youth, and mournfully laments his loss, is a highpoint in her career. She rarely had so poetic a scene of tragic delicacy.

But the story, oddly enough, for all we may approve of the hatred shown for the powerful who use and discard us, is not fully acceptable. Henried's general is too stupid (he almost launches a missile attack on Russia while talking to Hepburn). Brynner is so impossibly arrogant that a consortium of his fellow billionaires would probably ruin him to shut him up. But the acting is still so good that it one can forget these minor problems. Any film where Donald Pleasance uses his prominent proboscis by putting it into a drinking glass to smell for oil cannot be all bad. So I'll give it a "6", if not higher.