gwnightscream
Steve Martin, Daryl Hannah, Rick Rossovich and Shelly Duvall star in this 1987 comedy based on the play, "Cyrano de Bergarac." Martin (The Jerk) plays Charlie, a fire chief with a unique nose which becomes handy for his profession. Hannah (Splash) plays the title character who is an astronomer he falls for. Rossovich (Top Gun) plays firefighter, Chris who joins Charlie's team and who also falls for Roxanne. He seeks Charlie's help in wooing her and Charlie begins writing romantic poetry which swipes her off her feet. She eventually learns that Charlie is her poet and Duvall (The Shining) plays Dixie, his friend. I grew up watching this and always enjoyed it, Martin is great as usual, he and Hannah have good chemistry and I like Bruce Smeaton's score. I recommend this good 80's romantic comedy.
grizzledgeezer
If you've seen the José Ferrer "Cyrano de Bergerac", it's permanently etched in your memory. (The Depardieu version is good-but-not-great.) It's one of the great romances, true or fictional, and Ferrer's Oscar-winning performance will leave you in tears. What can you do to improve it?NOTHING. Leave it alone. A timeless work doesn't need updating, let alone a translation to another venue, which only diminishes it."Roxanne" has a basically happy ending, which spoils the whole thing. We all cry over the things we want, but can't have. (In 2008, I lost the thing I most loved in life, but could never have.) We need catharsis. "Cyrano" supplies it. "Roxanne" is devoid of any real emotion.
James Hitchcock
Edmond Rostand's 1897 verse play "Cyrano de Bergerac" is often described as a tragi-comedy because, although it contains many comic elements, it ends tragically. Steve Martin, however, clearly thought that the basic story would work equally well as a pure comedy, and relocated it to a contemporary setting in small-town America. Martin himself plays the Cyrano figure, Charlie "CD" Bales, the local fire chief. Like Rostand's character, he is witty, acrobatic, charming and intelligent but has a very large nose. Rostand's Roxane becomes a pretty young female astronomer named Roxanne (the etymologically incorrect but more normal spelling in English). The third member of the triangle, Christian, becomes Chris, a handsome but dim-witted and inarticulate member of Charlie's team. The love-triangle plot is essentially the same as Rostand's. Charlie is in love with Roxanne, but feels unable to pursue her because he is very self-conscious about his nose. Roxanne falls for Chris, not only because of his looks but also because she believes him to be romantic and intelligent, not realising that the love letters which he used to win her heart were actually written for him by Charlie.The term "romantic comedy" is often used to mean any boy-meets-girl love story with a happy ending, regardless of whether or not it is particularly humorous. "Roxanne" meets the standard Hollywood rom-com formula; it is a boy-meets-girl love story which ends happily after the obstacles to their love (Charlie's self-consciousness about his looks, Roxanne's infatuation with Chris) have been overcome. This, however, is a romantic comedy where the comedy is at least as important as the romance, and it is often brilliantly funny. The two scenes which stood out for me were the "Twenty Nose Insults" speech, where Charlie uses his wit and skill with words to put down a lout who has insulted him in a bar, and the scene where the hopelessly clumsy and oafish Chris tries to woo Roxanne using Charlie's words, relayed to him via a radio link. At his worst Steve Martin can be a rather annoying actor, but at his best he is a comic genius with a verbal dexterity reminiscent of the great Robin Williams, and he is certainly at his best here. Daryl Hannah still appears to be working in the cinema and television, but she is not the big name she once was, and few of her films from this century, apart from the two "Kill Bill" episodes, have attracted much attention. In her twenties and thirties, however, she was regarded as a rising star, even though with her lanky, boyish figure and long face she did not really have the classical looks of a Hollywood goddess. (I don't think having a boy's name really helped her either; I often wondered why she didn't simply reverse the order of her names to become the more obviously feminine Hannah Daryl). As with Martin the standard of her acting was variable, but here, as she had done in "Splash" three years earlier, she makes a sweet, charming and unaffected romantic comedy heroine, playing a woman who is not only attractive but also educated and intelligent without resorting to that old "bespectacled bluestocking" cliché. Mention should also be made of Rick Rossovich who gives a good comic performance as Chris. In the eighties he was seen as another promising newcomer but quickly dropped off the radar; the last role I saw him in was a bit part in that dire superhero spoof "Black Scorpion II", made less than a decade after this film. Shelley Duvall is also good as Roxanne's friend Dixie. Fred Schepisi is clearly a versatile director who can work in various film genres. I originally associated him with true-life crime dramas like "The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith" and "A Cry in the Dark", both set in his native Australia, but he has also turned his hand to comedy. "IQ" (another American rom-com) and "Fierce Creatures" (a British sort-of- sequel to "A Fish Called Wanda") are other examples, but "Roxanne" is probably his best. It is shot against some striking scenery- the town is supposed to be somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, although the film was actually shot across the Canadian border in British Columbia- and features a masterly comic performance from Martin with good contributions from the rest of the cast. This is one of the funniest, and best, romantic comedies of the eighties. 8/10
