The Swan

Absolutely completely well done film by the future Princess Grace of Monaco, Grace Kelly and supporting staff including dreamy Louis Jordan, staunch Alec Guiness, and a surprise entry as Queen, Agnes Moorehead.

Each actor worked so well together and yet in each one's style. Complete delight to watch the story unfold, ebb & flow, and then glide just like a swan to a restful ending. A fantastic use of comedy for interjections into a plot line that could easily been bogged down in monarchical dribble.

What an orchestra of a movie. I was put off a bit by the overly flowery love declarations from Jourdan to Kelly, but outside of that, everything was a delight to watch.

What clinched this movie for me is Guiness's description of a swan: gliding and graceful in water, but cumbersome and put off as a goose on land. The need for them to shine forever on the water in order for their beauty to be appreciated. Ahhhh.... wonderful.

The summer of 1955 Grace Kelly read love letters from her real-life prince while sitting on the terrace of the Biltmore Estate in Ashville, N.C., waiting for the cameras to be set up for exterior shots of "The Swan." I saw the film for the first time in 1958 at the 25-cent movies for University of Illinois students in Champaign-Urbana. I thought my date that night looked like Louis Jourdan, the tutor who dared to love a princess. I watched the videotape of "The Swan" just before visiting the Biltmore Estate the summer of 1998. I looked for the rooms in "The Swan." They are studio sets.

Delightful, witty screenplay. A collection of perfectly constructed moments of awkwardness, beautifully photographed by Ruttenberg and Surtees (who did Oklahoma, The Graduate and Last Time i Saw Paris between them) and perfectly shot by Charles Vidor. A fun performance by Alec Guinness as Prince Albert who visits Grace Kelly's princess on a tour of all the princesses in the country, in search of a wife. Louis Jordan, as the young professor, contender for the princess's affections, is very good and looks like a young Colin Firth.

Grace Kelly looks lovelier than ever, and is quite excellent in the role of her life - the role she played for the statesmen of Hollywood. She was just a little girl from Philadelphia who looked like a princess, so they asked her to learn to speak like a princess. And she did. They sent her tapes of elegant speech, and gave her tuition in elegance - and she played the part perfectly. The fun, flirtatious girl she was remained hidden from the public by the press, who in those days co-operated with the Hollywood political establishment. For all the public knew, Grace Kelly was merely a beautiful, elegant woman who played herself on screen. This was not the case. Like Humphrey Bogart, she was not originally like her on screen persona, but like Cary Grant, she eventually became it - through outside circumstance, when she was proposed to by Prince Rainier of Monaco, who met her on a publicity stunt visit. Here, Grace took the elegant persona of Dial M for Murder and Rear Window a step further, anticipating what it would be like to be an actual princess. In less than a year she would know from personal experience, but in The Swan she predicts the feeling perfectly, coming off looking completely genuine. She depicts the confusion of the princess beautifully, the awkwardness and uncertainty despite best intentions. She reveals her feelings at once in the "box him on the ears" speech beautifully - watch her eyes. Such a tender, genuine moment.

Interesting to note that The Swan's screenplay writer/adapter, John Dighton, also co-wrote the screenplay for "Roman Holiday", since one can logically assume that MGM's decision to film Molnar's play "The Swan" was inspired by the success of the earlier film; the similarities are obvious.

"Swan" must be regarded as one of the great DIALOGUE films of the '50's; the exchanges between all of the characters are continually witty and engaging, and the cast clearly relished the opportunity to perform such beautifully written material.

The direction is fine and, except for a few slow patches, keeps the action and dialogue moving at a rapid clip. The performances are uniformly solid, with Alec Guiness in top form as the bemused, distracted and somewhat shallow Crown Prince Alexander; a more deft and perfectly controlled performance could not be imagined.

Jessie Royce Landis also excels in a typically thankless sort of role, and a major one at that. In fact, the expert performances are clearly the result of the high level of STAGE experience of Guiness, Landis, and Brian Aherne (as the aristocrat-turned-monk Karl), among others. You almost feel that you are watching Molnar's original play in a filmed version, so fascinating is the chamber-like, character-driven nature of the dialogue and action.

The scene near the end where Alec Guiness convinces his mad-cap Queen/mother (Agnes Moorehead) to unknowingly give her blessing to the romance between Grace Kelly and Louis Jordan is but one of the many delightful, dazzlingly-delivered dialogue scenes.

Oddly, I found Grace Kelly's much-heralded performance to lack a certain amount of intensity; her screen presence rarely seems particularly commanding; this may be due to the essentially reticent nature of her character. However, she definitely seemed to "catch fire"--in all of her understated, regal beauty---during her lengthy waltz scene with Louis Jordan. One really senses the awakening of her deepest emotions, even though she only occasionally glances at her partner. And then goofy Alec Guiness decides to go play the double-bass in the court orchestra instead of romancing Grace. I laughed out loud.

My reaction at the end of the film was rather unexpected, given what I knew of the "Roman Holiday-style" ending. In that film, I was heart- broken during Gregory Peck's long, lonely final walk. But here---due entirely to the very real, conflicted nature of all three principal characters, I felt that Grace Kelly's choice may have been, in fact, the better one. It's difficult to know, human nature being a rather complex thing. And therein lies much of the brilliance of this film.

Bronislau Kaper's score is also delightful, and beautifully captures the musical idiom of the era and its locale, the "swan song" as it were of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose faded glory would become extinct less than a decade later.

A FILM THAT SHOULD BE FAR BETTER KNOWN AND ACCLAIMED THAN IT IS.

LR

Before her marriage to Prince Rainier, Grace Kelly made this next-to-last film for M-G-M, the royalty (though, alas, in somewhat of a decline from its glory days) of Hollywood's studio "system." I thought it, along with "High Society," a graceful exit for the lovely Miss Kelly, and M-G-M surrounded her with thorough professionals both before and behind the CinemaScope cameras. I especially enjoyed Alec Guinness, Jessie Royce Landis, and the wonderful Estelle Winwood, as well as Brian Aherne and Louis Jourdan. It's not available on DVD (and may possibly never be) and, I fear, the VHS version is formatted to fit the full screens of non-widescreen TVs. Too bad...It's a handsome production which, no doubt, won't visually impress very much when diminished by, ugh!, "formatting." What's wrong with "letterboxing," may I ask? Maybe it's the word itself!