If you loved Charles Boyer in this movie ...

If you loved Charles Boyer in this movie, rent "Fanny" (1961) -- from Marcel Pagnol's trilogy set in Marseilles, France, during the 1920's. It has a great French cast including Maurice Chevalier and Leslie Caron. Fanny was made 9 years after The Happy Time, when Boyer was in his early sixties. He once again plays an eccentric father, with one of the most touching father/son scenes I've ever watched, in which Boyer chokes up telling his son that, though he often says his son has ruined his life, "It's not true!" Those three words are delivered with so much emotion that it reminds me that Boyer's own son committed suicide a few years after Fanny was made, so some of the emotion in his voice may have reflected his feeling for his own troubled boy. Fanny also has a couple of wonderful father/son "facts of life" lectures, similar to the one in The Happy Time. In one, Boyer tells his son, who has the night before had sex with the teenage Leslie Caron (Fanny) that "a woman's virtue is like a match" (Boyer strikes a match) -- "You can only use it once." In another scene, when his son returns from sea and wants to reclaim his child, whom a generous Maurice Chevalier has raised as his own, Boyer tells his son that, "Love is like cigarette smoke -- it doesn't weigh very much. It takes a lot of love to make 23 pounds." And proceeds to explain to the boy that Chevalier gave the bulk of the love to the baby while the natural father was away at sea. It's a great, loving scene, especially Boyer's gently chiding line, when he comes in on his son kissing Fanny in her husband's house: "Don't, my children. Don't do this. Panisse (Chevalier) is a decent man. Don't make him look ridiculous in his own house." Boyer was the best.

"The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power."
- Julius Caesar, act 2 sc 1