Cyrano de Bergerac (1900) Review- By Michael J. Carlisle

Title: Cyrano de Bergerac
Year: 1900
Director: Clement Maurice
Country: France
Language: French

Cyrano de Bergerac is a french film from the start of the twentieth century which features both sound and color. Wait, WHAT!? Yes, you heard me, sound AND color. Too often have I come across people who think that color film began in 1939 with Wizard of Oz and too often have I heard (and admittedly wrote about) that sound began with a Eureka moment in 1927 with The Jazz Singer. The reality is much more complicated. Both were popularized around those respective times, but film-makers had tinkered with the technology since the beginning of film. 

Cyrando de Bergerac is a swaggering swordsman and poet with a cartoonishly large nose, which makes him unwilling to woo his beautiful and intellectual cousin, Roxane, so he offers to help the handsome but dim Christian romance her via letter.

The character of Cyrano de Bergerac is about dash, panache and mind games and all of that is conveyed in the performance. Body language is something to behold, it makes the film as grand as it can be. This is great, because the sound is fairly lackluster, sounding like a high pitched telephone recording.  Early sound was created in many ways, but for this particular film sound was recorded on wax cylinders which were then played in sync with the film. One would think that such an ingenious idea would translate into monetary success, but while the technology had buzz, it did not translate into ticket sales and the company quietly folded.

The color in the film was applied by hand, a fairly common practice at the time, which yields a watercolor-like effect. There's no doubt that it is far from the beautiful technicolor in Wizard of Oz, but we should appreciate the use of color in its early stages. The star of the film Coquelin aîne was fairly well known in France at the time. The Errol Flynn's of 1900, Coquelin pulls of a tremendous performance in this fairly short film version of a popular stage play. 

If you're interested in learning about the progression of film throughout history, then this is certainly a must-see. Its sound and color isn't up to par, but it's worth your time to view sound at a time when it wasn't really a thing in the mainstream. Cyrano de Bergerac is attempt at innovation for the sake of innovation.