don-druker

I think if you check the original production notes for the stage production of Irma La Douce, you'll find that Marguerite Monnod was the composer. Andre Previn adapted her score for the film, but there is no way he "composed" it. For some reason, Hollywood seems to have overlooked Marguerite Monnod, who was one of France's most accomplished popular composers, supplying the music for some of Edith Piaf's greatest hits. When Previn accepted his Oscar, he thanked everyone except Marguerite Monnod. I asked him about this oversight during a public event at the American Film Institute and he became visibly angry.

There's something both amusing and deeply annoying about the way all of the critics -- and I'm being as generous as possible with the term -- dismiss this comic gem as just another chance to watch Cary Grant coast on a collection of his signature mannerisms without the need to do anything as serious as act. What a crock! Watching Grant during the first fifteen minutes of this delightful film is like sitting in on a master class in comedy. Cary Grant's comic timing, his unmatched subtlety in reading a line or simply snapping out a single word like Buddy Rich effortlessly firing rimshots, his acrobatic skill juggling props, his Buddhist concentration when another actor is setting him up for yet one more hilarious line reading -- these are the gifts of one of the screen's most gifted and creative actors. The dialogue by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank may not be Shaw or Wilde, but it's clever and well-paced and, most significantly, ideally constructed to give Cary Grant and his very special co-stars Myrna Loy and Melvin Douglas the opportunity to show just exactly how great ensemble comic acting is supposed to work. They often talk about certain male ballet dancers as perfect partners, but here it's Myrna Loy who demonstrates what movie partnering can achieve. It's no wonder audiences loved her when she was working alongside actors like Bill Powell and Cary Grant; by being better than you expected her to be, she made them better, which is what a great partner is supposed to do. And Melvin Douglas' wry and often hilariously understated line readings are a perfect complement to Loy and Grant. "Mister Blandings Builds His Dream House" is not the greatest comedy ever filmed, nor is it even the greatest Cary Grant performance, and perhaps critics (again I'm being generous with that overused word) aren't far off in characterizing the film as a fairly formulaic postwar Hollywood comedy. Perhaps. But, I would still put this film on the syllabus of any class in film acting and I would make damn sure drama students watched it very, very attentively.

If you're a fan of Midsomer Murders, but also like your mysteries to have a decidedly Gallic twist, then Magellan is absolutely for you. The plots are convoluted, the suspects are plentiful, and the dogged Inspector is invariably going to get his man (or woman). But, what sets Magellan apart from what the French would call its British homologue is its edginess, its willingness to discover dark little corners in the psyches of even its most sympathetic characters, even Inspector Magellan himself. There's a focus on the actual crime investigation itself that sometimes gets blurred in Midsomer Murders; unlike its British cousin, Magellan's narratives are sharper, more detailed, and easier to take seriously. None of the casualness that sometimes makes Midsomer Murders seem like an excuse to meander through the sometimes incomprehensible (to a foreigner) personality quirks of the British provincial elite. There's real police business being done here, and Simon Magellan, despite his Colomboesque sartorial disarray and his exasperation with his often uncomfortable role as a 21st century divorced father desperately trying to do the right thing by his precocious teenaged daughters, really is a highly respected and insightful cop. His characteristically French aura of ironic detachment barely conceals a good and decent man who clearly understands what makes people tick and uses that understanding to tease out ingenious solutions to the tangled mysteries he encounters (references to Simenon's Maigret would be appropriate at this point). Yes, the mythical Northern town of Saignac appears to account for just about all of the murders recorded in France in any given month, but that's what we love about formulaic, locked room mysteries like this -- they tell us that the world may seem perennially out of joint, but that with local heroes like Tom Barnaby in England and Simon Magellan in France, everything will turn out more or less alright.