Word: braggadocio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Comedy becomes slapstick, courage becomes arrant braggadocio, and even the celebrated nose assumes absurd proportions under Ferrer's touch. He forgets that the one extreme about which Cyrano's character revolves is that of unswerving devotion to a personal code of honor. By removing this one characteristic of universal appeal from Cyrano, Ferrer has also taken away the element of audience self-identification, perhaps the most important aspect of the play. This is not to say that Ferrer's acting is not often superb. It is. In the balcony and convent scenes, he extracts the utmost from Rostand's brilliant...
...comedy routines dating back to Mack Sennett and before. Hope is still the fumbling poltroon, this time a ham actor who masquerades as a gentleman's gentleman in England, then becomes a real valet masquerading in the Wild West as a British earl. He caricatures snobbery and braggadocio, unfailingly spills tea trays all over an English hostess, unwittingly courts death at the hands of a cowboy villain (Bruce Cabot) and becomes the prey of a pack of mongrels drafted for a sagebrush foxhunt...