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The
Golden Coach by Andrew Sarris
The
Golden Coach, adapted
very freely from Prosper Merimee’s La Carrosse du Saint
Sacrement, takes place in the eighteenth century and revolves
around the golden coach that the viceroy of Peru had delivered
from Europe. His mistress hopes that he will give it to her
as a love token, but he chooses instead to bestow it on Camilla,
the star of a touring commedia dell’arte company from
Italy. The viceroy’s ministers threaten to depose him if he
goes through with his ruinously extravagant gesture. Camilla
resolves the impasse by donating the coach to the bishop of
Lima.
“My
principal collaborator on this film,” Renoir recalls in his
sketchily autobiographical My Life and My Films, “was
the late Antonio Vivaldi. I wrote the script while listening
to records of his music, and his wit and sense of drama led
me on to developments in the best tradition of the Italian theater.”
Nonetheless,
the film, as well as the coach itself, was conceived primarily
as a vehicle for the tempestuous talents of Anna Magnani. Renoir
considered her incarnation of Camilla “dazzling” and clearly
built the film around her. Her flair for demotic street comedy
was transfigured into stylized nobility by sumptuous costuming
and Renoir’s formal camera work.
In
its own time, however, The Golden Coach was an international
failure in all three language versions with both the critics
and the public. (Produced at Cinecitta in Rome, it was premiered
in its French version in Paris in February 1953. Renoir reportedly
preferred the English version presented in this release to the
Italian version.) The fifties were not a time for subtextual
analysis of movies. Yet even Bosley Crowther, the powerful no-nonsense
critic of the New York Times, was compelled to acknowledge
the sensuous texture of the color photography as he dismissed
the film’s apparently naïve plot and its supposedly “beauteous”
and “ravishing” star. “But what we see in Miss Magnani,” the
captious Crowther cackled, “is a bar refinement of a female
guttersnipe, a lusty and lumpish termagant with more raucous
vitality than charm.”
Seen
today by the international community of cinephiles as a truly
“beauteous” and “ravishing” comic fantasy from Jean Renoir’s
late period, The Golden Coach can best be appreciated
as an illustrious filmmaker’s elegant tribute to the theater.
The “comedy” does not consist of laugh-provoking gags or expertly
timed slapstick, but is based instead on a clear-eyed vision
of art’s denial of “normal” life. Instead of seeking the nonexistent
“psychology” of the characters, one must follow the flowing
images as a mobile painting driven by Magnani and Vivaldi across
the canvas of an Italianate spectacle. Eric Rohmer has described
The Golden Coach as “the open sesame” of all Renoir’s
work. The two customary poles of his work—art and nature, acting
and life—take shape in two facing mirrors, which reflect each
other’s images back and forth until it is impossible to tell
where one ends and the other begins.
To
claim, as reviewers of the time did, that Renoir had failed
to produce a convincing narrative, is to scorn Matisse and Picasso
for not painting plausible pictures. Jean Renoir, the son of
Auguste Renoir, became a modernist of the cinema in the manner
of Cezanne’s assertion that he was painting pictures, not apples.
Renoir films ideas out of pictures. To the untutored eye the
acting, aside from Magnani, ranges from inadequate to indifferent.
The dialogue ranges from the functional to the feckless. Yet
the film concludes on a note of sublime eloquence when Don Antonio,
the stage manager, addresses the Columbine of Anna Magnani:
“You were not made for what is called life. Your place is among
us, the actors, acrobats, mimes, clowns, jugglers. You will
find your happiness only on stage each night for the two hours
in which you ply your craft as an actress—that is, when you
forget yourself. Through the characters that you will incarnate,
you will perhaps find the real Camilla.”
Then
Don Antonio asks Camilla if she misses her three vanished lovers.
After a moment’s meditation, the gloriously ambivalent Magnani
replies, “A leetle.” The brilliant, unforced ironies of The
Golden Coach remind us that conventional cleverness and
facility are no substitutes for genius. One must not merely
look at The Golden Coach. One must look through it
to discern the cinematic brush strokes of a great artist.
Andrew Sarris is a film critic
for The New York Observer
and a professor of film at the School of the Arts at Columbia
University . His most recent book is You Ain’t Heard Nothin’
Yet: The American Talking Film: History & Memory, 1927
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