31. Gigi (1958)

Plot Intro

Paris, 1900. A young ingenue, Gigi (Leslie Caron), is being brought up by her Grandmother (Hermione Gingold) and Aunt Alicia (Isabel Jeans) to be a regal, refined, elegant lady about town, complete with skills in dining, jewels and appropriate behaviour. Unfortunately, Gigi is energetic, clumsy and prefers silliness to society. Meanwhile, rich, handsome bachelor Gaston Lachaille (Louis Jourdan) is bored with Parisian society. Inevitably, the two find solace in each other and begin to fall in love…

Paul says...

Gigi is a film about the young against the old, making it very much a film of its time. The older characters in the film are obsessed with the antique Parisian style of romance- the beautiful, picturesque, chaste sort of romance one finds in Renaissance paintings. Unfortunately, there’s no soul, sense of humour or sex to it, so the two youthful lovers, who would rather jump around the sea or get sloshed on champagne together, find themselves in contention with their morally dignified elders. At this point in our journey through the Oscars, it’s 1958, and Elvis Presley’s pelvic gyrations were shocking the old and enflaming the young. As such, a film about young people finding love in their own way, and shirking off the endless rules and confinements of their strict families could not have resonated more.

What we are also seeing is the early stages of the Hays Code becoming less relevant. This Code was enforced in Hollywood in the mid-30’s to restrict film-makers from showing too many sexual references and nudity. “Pre-Code” films such as The Broadway Melody and It Happened One Night are noticeably more naughty than the chastity and restraint of Rebecca and Mrs Miniver. The making of a musical adaptation of the 1944 novella, Gigi, was delayed due to the producer, Arthur Freed, battling the Hays Code, which forbade the presentation of courtesans and men with mistresses (it was just far too shocking for human eyes!) But the film got made, and Hitchcock’s sex-and-violence-studded Psycho was only two years away, so evidently the Code is slowly but surely going out of the window to be eventually replaced with the gritty reality of the '70s films.

But less of such historical nonsense! Do I like Gigi? Not really, I’m afraid to say. It meanders a little blindly between a satire of Parisian society’s obsession with style over substance, and a slightly silly farce about men and women flirting with each other. It settles on neither and so both attempts at the genres are a bit weak for me. The songs are generally forgettable too. I like some big-belters or dance routines in a musical but we got neither. And the most well known song, “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”, is basically an older gentleman singing about how lovely small girls are because they will grow into beautiful women. You might argue that this was innocent at the time but by today’s standards it’s just weird and creepy. 

The film gains some points from me thanks to Leslie Caron’s spirited and fun performance in the title role. I wished that her lust for life and spiritedness was emphasised more (like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music) but she only gets a handful of funny lines and then works with whatever else she can pull from the inane script. There are splashes of humour in some short scenes where Gigi is trained by her Aunts and fails miserably, and when the Parisian upper classes gossip about each other. But again, these moments are too few and far between.

Gigi has moments of amusement but it’s a bit of a lame horse in a decade filled with spectacular and moving pieces. It needed the acrobatics of Gene Kelly or the ensemble scenes of West Side Story to give it more oomph. 

Highlight

A French lady cheats on Gaston with an ice skater (gasp!) so Gaston pays the ice skater to leave Paris. We then cut to Aunt Alicia who states, “Madame d’Exelmans has committed suicide AGAIN!” which I thought was very funny.

Lowlight

The narrator of the tale, Gaston’s slightly pervy Uncle, gets a great deal of screen time but doesn’t do a lot to move the plot. Hardly “narrator” material.

Mark

3/10

Doug says...

The difficulty about this film is that it’s so forgettable that I can hardly remember any of it to actually discuss. And what there is to discuss, Paul has already gone into, above. It’s hard to believe this comes from the same decade as such a powerful and forward-thinking film as All About Eve, with discussions of courtesans and wives abounding throughout, and a generally xenophobic opinion that the French all cheat on each other.

Gigi herself is tolerable, a young woman who enjoys her life (a life which is described as impoverished despite her family’s constant serving of champagne to any guest who swings by), but Gaston, the ‘hero’ is hardly fleshed out and has a very repetitive song at the beginning about how he is bored, ironically boring us in the process. There’s a Rex Harrison-My-Fair-Lady feel to much of the singing, but without the required wit to carry us through and engage us. 

The best things of this film come from the grandmother and great aunt Alicia, the latter of whom is a rich ex-courtesan who instructs Gigi in how to drink wine politely and walk around a room with the required finesse. It’s sterling work from Isabel Jeans who manages to turn most of her lines into comic punchlines and bring some vitality to this otherwise fairly limited film. 

But for me the MVP was actually Gigi’s grandmother, played by Hermione Gingold. We’ve actually seen Gingold before, albeit in a tiny cameo in Around the World in Eighty Days, and it’s nice to see her actually flex her acting muscles here, and give probably the best performance in the film. It’s filled with nuance, and we see her gradual change from supporting Alicia to supporting Gigi - the old embracing the needs and views of the new. Not to mention her duet with her ex-lover (none other than Gaston’s slightly creepy uncle), where he mis-remembers all the elements of their affair and she snappily corrects him was my favourite song of the show. 

It’s a slow moving film and once it gets going, it ends. But while nothing particularly happens, everything that does happen, happens too quickly. We find out that Gaston wants Gigi to be his mistress through a rapid little scene between Alicia and the grandmother which basically fills the audience in and doesn’t show us any of Gaston’s thought processes that got him to offer this deal. And while not enough time is spent on plot, too much is spent on music. The title (and might I add Oscar winning) song Gigi is dull, overlong and ultimately so forgettable that I started dozing off halfway through. Not a musical highlight of cinematic history. 

It felt like an old-school musical, and knowing that we have the groundbreaking choreography of West Side Story, and the visual powerhouse that is The Sound of Music on the horizon, it’s more of a farewell nod to a rapidly vanishing style of cinema musicals, in a few years after Gigi, musicals will replace style with substance, and bring plot to the forefront - using the music not as aesthetically pleasing pauses, but as ways to drive the story forward. 

Highlight

Hermione Gingold’s sharp put-downs during ‘I Remember It Well’, a song in which her ex-lover Honore Lachaille, forgets everything about their relationship, are great. 

Lowlight

The film as a whole feels dusty and like a farewell to this old-school style of musicals. Bring on the groundbreakers I say. 

Mark

2/10

30. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

Plot Intro

We’re in Japanese-occupied Thailand in 1943, and an English platoon has been captured by the Japanese army. They are led by Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness), a popular patriot and obstinate stickler for rules. There, they are forced into manual labour by Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) to build a railway bridge across the river Kwai. Determined to prove English efficiency and engineering as superior to Japanese, Nicholson takes command of the construction (much to the chagrin of Saito). Meanwhile, an escaped American prisoner, Commander Sheers (William Holden), is part of a group led by Major Warden (Jack Hawkins) to try and blow up the bridge…

Doug says...

This is a strange and mesmerising film. At first glance, it seems to be a film about war and army values (yawn) but then actually it becomes more of a critique of the army attitudes to the world versus the natural human attitudes. It’s also a slow-moving, affecting study of man’s compulsion to build rather than destroy, and how far one will go to protect their work. 

The first hour sets up for a different film altogether with the hero Colonel Nicholson doing battle with the dastardly Colonel Saito, a Japanese soldier in charge of the Prisoner of War camp. They challenge each other over authority and Saito locks Nicholson in a metal box under the sun’s glare for several days. So far, so obvious. It is clearly setting up for a Good Vs Evil, English Vs Japanese flick to just remind everyone over a decade post-war how great the Brits are. 

Except then it does a huge flip, Nicholson skilfully negotiates, Saito backs down, and Nicholson begins building the bridge of the title as a way to prove the strength and skill of the British Army. And you slowly realise that there are no heroes or villains here. Saito reveals that if he does not complete the bridge on time, he will be forced to commit suicide, hence his aggressive actions. No baddies after all. 

Meanwhile there’s a bunch of British and American soldiers trying to get to the bridge to blow it up. They speak far more brutally of having to ‘leave each other behind’ and of the coldness required to kill a man. It’s a different mindset, and not one that becomes any more rational or easy to accept through the film. A doctor from the camp sees these attitudes, alongside Nicholson’s tunnel vision focus on his men’s well-doing and the bridge he is constructing, and questions it all with great seriousness. At first we are annoyed with the doctor, but as the film progresses we begin to side with him, wondering quite how these obsessive characters with their different obsessions will end. 

It’s an Oscar winning performance from Alec Guinness that pins down the whole film and you are always keen to get back to his scenes and watch his depiction of a man torn between his army duties and the love of his own creation. 

Highlight 

When Nicholson stands on the completed bridge, looking out over the sunny waters, and talks of how he wonders what - if anything - his life will mean. It’s a moment that captures a concern common to everyone, and the tension we already have for the bridge’s fate ensures it’s a fleeting moment, as transient and quick as life itself. 

Lowlight

A few of the scenic scenes - trekking through the jungle - ramble quite long. They’re full of beautiful imagery which is no wonder why they’re there. But they slow the pace of a long film unnecessarily. 

Mark 

10/10

Paul says...

What I love most about The Bridge on the River Kwai is its structure. There are two major storylines- that of Nicholson constructing the bridge, and that of Shears and Warden planning to destroy it. Unlike many war films, this is heavy on character and dialogue so there is a great deal of talking and scene-setting, but the suspense and excitement are maintained for the full two and a half hours because the two storylines constantly circle each other in a double helix, almost touching but never quite. The total opposition of the major characters’ objectives keep the audience tense, and as the double helix becomes tighter and tighter, and the two storylines become closer and closer, the tension becomes unbearable. We are constantly reminded that when both storylines eventually collide, the result will be literally and figuratively explosive- and we are far from disappointed at the final climax. 

Long this film may be, but it is far from dull. The character work is second to none. It is similar to From Here to Eternity in that the unquestionable war-heroics of Greer Garson and Humphrey Bogart are dispensed with, and what we are left with are no heroes and villains at all but rather characters doing good and bad things for complex reasons. Whether you agree or disagree with their actions is beside the point, now the only imperative is to understand them. Saito’s tyranny is driven by his desire to build the bridge on time- the consequence of failing would be seppuku (suicide). Nicholson’s collusion with the enemy to build the bridge is driven by his desire to prove that the English are far superior in its work force- a drive augmented by Saito’s own deluded determination to prove that punishment and shouting are great motivators (this man obviously needs a crash-course in team management). And Warden’s obsession with destroying the bridge is created by his unquestioning conviction that the British must win this godforsaken war. The fact that the whole film ends in tragedy and mayhem is no surprise when all these characters’ motivations are working against each other.

It also raises questions about how one should prove your nation’s superiority in wartime. The natural assumption is to bomb the shit out of your opposing country until they’re too weak to fight back. But Nicholson demonstrates a different way- that of building the bridge quicker and more efficiently than your enemies in order to intimidate them. He turns out to be right, as Saito spends a vast majority of the final hour in silent shock and awe at British prowess. It’s just a shame that such prowess will prove advantageous to the enemy. So how does one display national strength? By destroying, or by creating?

Analyses aside, this is a cracking good film. The location filming in Sri Lanka is stunning, the performances are phenomenal (Alec Guinness demonstrates some spectacular character-acting in a performance that he was actually quite insecure about), and for a film that is light on action, it is tremendously exciting. Not many character-driven films can achieve such stature.

Highlight

The final 20 minutes are incredibly tense. All the characters are assembled like chess pieces around the centrepiece of the completed bridge, and you have no idea what’s about to happen- but you know it won’t be good.

Lowlight

There’s an arbitrary and irrelevant quasi-romantic love story between a minor lieutenant and a Burmese peasant girl who doesn’t speak English. It’s brief but it’s totally pointless.

Mark

10/10