Fanny

On the Marseille waterfront, Fanny and Marius love each other, but Marius wants to go to sea. Fanny finds herself pregnant and marries Panisse, a wealthy sailmaker far older than she is. As the boy grows up, his parentage stays the secret everybody knows and nobody says out loud. The film is not interested in who gets to keep love. It is interested in who raising a child turns into a father. Its moral centre is not Marius but Panisse, the man who genuinely claims his wife's son. Its form has an odd history: this is a musical with the songs taken out. The source was the 1954 stage musical by Logan and S. N. Behrman. When Julius J. Epstein adapted it, every song went, while Harold Rome's music stayed on as underscore and is heard as the main title theme. Behind that source lies Marcel Pagnol's Marseille trilogy: the plays Marius (1929) and Fanny (1931), completed by César, which Pagnol wrote and directed himself in 1936. The film collected five Oscar nominations. Joshua Logan directed. Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Charles Boyer and Horst Buchholz star, and it was shot in Marseille. Who it is for: admirers of classic melodrama, anyone curious about Pagnol's world, and viewers who want to see Boyer play an old man. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a musical. The songs are all gone; what remains is close to two and a half hours of emotional drama.