The Swan (1956)

Toronto Film Society presented The Swan (1956) on Monday, August 27, 1984 in a double bill with Royal Wedding as part of the Season 37 Summer Series, Programme 7.

Production Company: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.  Producer: Dore Schary.  Director: Charles Vidor.  Screenplay: John Dighton, based on the play by Ferenc Molnar.  Camera: Josseph Ruttenberg, Robert Surtees.  Editor: John Bunning.  Music: Bronislaw Kaper.  Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons and Randall Duell.  Set Decorations: Edwin B. Willis and Henry Grace.  Costumes: Helen Rose.

Cast:  Grace Kelly (Princess Alexandra), Alec Guinness (Prince Albert), Louis Jourdan (Dr. Nicholas Agi), Agnes Moorhead (Queen Maria Dominika), Jessie Royce Landis (Princess Beatrix), Brian Aherne (Father Hyacinth), Leo G. Carroll (Caesar), Estelle Winwood (Symphorosa), Van Dyke Parks (George), Christopher Cook (Arsene), Robert Coote (Captai Wunderlich), Doris Lloyd (Countess Sibenstoyn), Edith Barrett (Beatrix’ Maid).

In April 1956, the very month in which Charles Vidor’s The Swan was released, Grace Kelly of Philadelphia and Hollywood became Princess Grace of Monaco.  Any resemblance between MGM’s Ruritanian romance and the much publicized real-life fairy-tale marriage was anything but coincidental–despite the studio’s ludicrous token denial.  In a very free adaptation of the 1922 Ferenc Molnar chestnut of a play, Monaco’s modern Prince Rainier III had merely been transposed into an Austrian Alec Guinnes–to the delight of audiences and critics alike.

If The Swan was Hollywood’s intended wedding gift to their departing princess (crowned with an Oscar a year previously for The Country Girl), it was a suitably lavish one.  Gift-wrapped in expensive sets by Cedric Gibbons and associates, filmed with the best camera lenses of the studio’s crown-prince of cameramen, Joseph Ruttenberg, scored lushly and tastefully by Bronislau Kaper, The Swan is a rich delicacy for both the eye and the ear.

All this expense in the production values was perhaps to be expected, but what surprised the critics of the time was the entertaining quality of the finished film, to be found especially in the unexpected humour and freshness of the script and the generally light touch of its heavy-weight cast.

Singled out for praise among the supporting players was Jessie Royce Landis, who repeated the role of Grace Kelly’s mother pretty much as she had played it in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief; Estelle Winwood, as Landis’s pixilated sister; Brian Aherne, comfortably back among the royalty that he may have been missing since his stint as the Emperor Maximilian in Juarez; Louis Jourdan as a wilfully romantic commoner; and Robert Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady on Broadway.  Only Agnes Moorhead was criticized for being too shrill in this otherwise quaint mythical world that both Guinness (in his first Hollywood film) and Kelly (in her next to last) enter into with a spirit of generous ensemble acting.

Much of the praise must go to the remarkable director Charles Vidor, who has been regularly unfairly treated by film historians.  Vidor has been omitted from both Andrew Sarris’s much respected The American Cinema and the recent two-volume Coursodon/Savage American Director.  Yet this is the director of some of America’s best loved movies.  His Cover Girl (1944) is a brilliant watershed musical that looks both back to the Astaire-Rogers musicals of the 1930s and ahead to the Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly style of the 1950s.  Gilda (1946) is perhaps the archetypal film noir, Love Mor Or Leave Me (1955) recreated the speak-easy era of Ruth Etting with compelling atmosphere, and provided Doris Day and James Cagney with two of their best realized roles.

But it is in the world of romance that Vidor excelled the most.  In spite of all their flaws, his classical composer romances, A Song to Remember (1945) and Song Without End (1959) remain singularly unforgettable.  And not too far removed from these is his classical performers’ film, Rhapsody (1954).  It is in this romantic category, of course, that we must place The Swan, and the choice that the Princess must make between two strong and admirable men (Jourdan and Guinness) recalls the choice that Elizabeth Taylor must make between Vittorio Gassman and John Ericson in To Remember, or that Rita Hayworth must make between Gene Kelly and Lee Bowman in Cover Girl.  It is Vidor’s habit to make his triangle resolutely equilateral to create believable tensions and difficult resolutions.

At their most serious, Charles Vidor’s romantic films can be honourably compared to the best of the estimable Frank Borzage.  In the case The Swan, the Variety reviewer went so far as to credit Vidor with having created in “The Swan Waltz” scene one of the finest love scenes ever filmed.  Before our very eyes, a love unmistakably crystallizes.  But the Films and Filming critic gave Vidor the highest praise of all, finding in the whimsical continental tone of The Swan an artistry worthy of Lubitsch!  It is criminal that a director of Charles Vidor’s talent is so often so quickly dismissed.

Notes by Cam Tolton