Can-Can

20th Century Fox, 1960
Starring Shirley MacLaine, Frank Sinatra, Maurice Chevalier, and Louis Jordan
Directed by Walter Lang
Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter

Let's take a trip to Paris in the late 1890's to forget our cares and enjoy a big, bright musical comedy. This Cole Porter hit did well enough on Broadway in 1953, where it introduced Gwen Verdon to audiences. It was enough of a hit for 20th Century Fox to adapt it to film seven years later as a vehicle for popular comedienne and dancer Shirley MacLaine, Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jordan coming off the success of Gigi, and Frank Sinatra. How does the story of a cafe owner who romances a judge in order to perform the scandalous dance in her establishment look now? We head to Montmartre, with it's colorful street life, to find out...

The Story: La Mome Pistache (MacLaine) runs a popular cafe in Montmartre where she performs the infamously leg-barring dance the Can-Can. Her lover and lawyer Francois Durnais (Sinatra) claims he has it all arranged, but the cafe is raided and her dancers arrested for indecency. Francois' friend Chief Magistrate Paul Barriere (Chevalier) tries to drop the charges, but his new colleague Judge Phillippe Forrestier (Jordan) truly thinks the Can-Can is indecent. He goes to the cafe under a different name the next night to find out for himself. Pistache tries to seduce him...and it works too well, as he falls for her.

After he arranges for another raid on the cafe, Francois tries to blackmail him with a photo of him in a compromising position. Turns out it's unnecessary. Phillippe has already dropped the charges and asked Pistache to marry him. She accepts his proposal, only to call it off after embarrassing herself getting drunk at a party on a boat. To get Francois back for plying her with liquor, she borrows money to hold a ball and signs the cafe over to Francois, only to have him arrested for showing the Can-Can this time. Now they all have to prove that showing a little leg is not a bad thing, and that the Can-Can is really good clean fun for all.

The Song and Dance: "Song and dance" are really the operative words here. The fluffy plot is mostly a framework for some of Cole Porter's best songs. MacLaine has a great time, whether she's dancing the Can-Can or trying to seduce Jordan. Chevalier and Jordan bring along some of the Gallic flair and wonderful chemistry that they also showed in Gigi, and in very similar roles. Juliet Prowse made her film debut here, and she does well in what little screen time she has. The lavish sets and costumes do a magnificent job of bringing Paris both high and low to life; the glittering costumes were Oscar-nominated.

Favorite Number: Sinatra and Jordan introduce us to the delights of Paris' red-light district in the opening number "Montmartre." "Maidens Typical of France" brings on Pistache's girls to show that they are anything but! Sinatra and MacLaine revel in their unmarried relationship with a tango to the ribald "Let's Do It." Barriere tries to convince his colleague to "Live and Let Live" after the second raid on the cafe. Sinatra sings a really nice "It's All Right With Me" to an attentive Prowse. "Come Along With Me" is Pistache's drunk song at the party, and MacLaine really throws herself into it, kicking and reeling and sitting in laps with abandon.

MacLaine figures into all three of the film's big numbers. She does an apache dance early on with two unnamed male dancers that shows her in a slightly more dramatic light. The Adam and Eve Ballet at the ball has her as Eve frolicking with a barely-clad Adam and dancers in animal costumes, before the snake brings the apple and turns up the heat. The finale is the big can-can in full, with Prowse and MacLaine swirling amid a riot of frills and black stocking-clad legs.

Trivia: The then-head of Russia, Nikita Khruschchev, visited the set and watched the can-can number be filmed, only to denounce it as "pornographic" and "depraved."

The original Broadway production of Can-Can was a hit in 1953 that ran a year and made a star of Gwen Verdon, who won her first Tony in Prowse's role. It also did relatively well in London a year later...but its success ended there. The movie was a hit, but was so expensive that it couldn't make its money back, and a Broadway revival in 1981 shuttered after five performances. A heavily revised London revival could only push three months in 1988 and 1989.

What I Don't Like: There's a reason this show doesn't do well in revival. This is pretty much fluffy, overlong silliness. It reduces Prowse's role to almost nothing, dropping a major subplot revolving around Claudine and her artist boyfriend, and didn't give Chevalier much to do either. Jordan's role is dull, and Sinatra is even more so. He was pretty much forced to do this after he dropped out of Carousel, and other than some good singing, doesn't look like he wants to be there. MacLaine and Sinatra sound and act more like residents of 1960 New York than 1890's Paris, especially compared to the actual French actors around them.

Several songs from the original show were cut from the film. The most notable loss was "I Love Paris," which is heard over the credits but not in the film itself. Apparently, it was filmed with Sinatra and Chevalier, but dropped. Wish they'd kept it. It's one of the show's signature hits. Other losses include "Never Give Anything Away" for Pistache and her girls, the solo ballad "I am In Love" for Judge Forrestier, and "Alles Vous-En" for Pistache.

The Big Finale: If you love the cast or want to check out some great Cole Porter music and have time on your hands, this is one trip to Paris worth making.

Home Media: On DVD as part of 20th Century Fox's Marquee Musicals series and on several streaming services.

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