DÉSIRÉE (1954)

Least revived film of Marlon Brando’s prime (it comes between ON THE WATERFRONT & GUYS AND DOLLS) and you’ll see why. Brando’s Napoleon Bonaparte actually takes backseat to Jean Simmons’ Désirée Clary, the minx from Marseilles he jilts to gain upward mobility with Merle Oberon’s Josephine. Désirée ‘settles’ for Michael Rennie’s Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, and is eventually crowned Queen when he’s plucked for royalty, no longer Bonaparte’s military & romantic rival, but Charles XIV of Sweden! All more or less true, though you’d never think it so from this flavorless production utterly bereft of French style in looks & cast with painfully American actors like Cameron Mitchell, John Hoyt & Richard Deacon (!) in court dress, alongside Brits like Rennie, Oberon, Simmons and even Brando who uses that tight Mid-Atlantic/British accent he favored for many Continental roles. Fresh off THE ROBE/’53, director Henry Koster still gingerly handles CinemaScope’s peculiarities with wide angle proscenium staging, effective for copying Jacques-Louis David’s famous Coronation painting if not much else. More typical, a disastrous last set, a visually inert, dead-centered formal garden stairway where Nappy & Désirée play out their talky adieu.

DOUBLE-BILL: Marlon refused to play in THE EGYPTIAN for this. (Simmons in that one, too; as well as co-starring in his next, GUYS AND DOLLS.) EGYPTIAN has its own dramatic problems, but the story (Physician Goes Monotheistic!) and its physical production have, at the least, more interest theoretically.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: In the film’s big romantic gesture, Désirée teaches Napoleon to waltz two decades before the dance was invented! Maybe they overheard playback coming from a neighboring 20th/Fox lot where THE KING AND I was currently shooting ‘Shall We Dance?,’ which is a polka!