Yeah, dumb joke…He’d be 106 if he was still alive.
Columbo. “Murder under Glass.” S07 E02.
Odd thing: I happened to be thinking about Silver Bears a half hour before I read the news.
Curious how his career just fizzled out. Octopussy in 83 but his next to last role was in The Return of Swamp Thing in 89. He became “too stereotypically French” to be taken seriously by many.
(And he is no longer “on the list” for “Who’s left from early TV?” thread.
Oh Gigi,
While you were trembling on the brink
Was I out yonder somewhere blinking at a star?
Oh Gigi,
Have I been standing up too close or back too far?
When did your sparkle turn to fire,
And your warmth become desire?
Oh, what miracle has made you the way you are?
That will always be what I remember him most for, as much as I loved him in Octopussy.
Poor guy hasn’t had an easy time of it…he lost his only son to drugs years ago and his wife passed only last year.
But even more important than his film career–he was active in the Resistance during WWII.
Aller avec Dieu, M. Jourdan.
Ms. Gingold, is that you? 
GIGI is just too disturbing these days. A ridiculously indulged, unsympathetic, whining rich guy makes friends with a little girl. When she hits puberty, her grandmother and great aunt conspire to sell him her virginity. Instead he marries her, and you know good and well he probably will be taking mistress before the honeymoon is over while singing another chorus of Its a Bore.
I have a much more generous view of the movie in general, and Gaston in particular.
Gaston was bored with his life because nearly everyone in it was playing their prescribed roles–“playing the game”. It was all mapped out for him–he’d take mistresses from the lower classes, take them to the usual places, buy them the usual gifts, get talked about in the usual newspapers. If he married, it would be to some “suitable” woman from his own class who’d pop out heirs and look the other way when he “spent late nights at the business.” He’d pretend to be outraged when his current mistress was caught cheating and she’d pretend to be heartbroken when he dumped her. (It’s strongly implied that his mistress Liane’s so-called suicide attempt wasn’t out of any deep feeling for Gaston, but merely for show.) Everything was an act–and that’s how it would be for the rest of his life.
Gigi is different from all that–because she is HONEST. She speaks her mind, she doesn’t playact or put on a show, and that’s what makes Gaston enjoy her company so much–she’s probably one of the only parts of his life that’s REAL. And now that she’s become a young woman, that feeling kindles into romantic love.
Her grandmother and great-aunt try to use this to their advantage, because that’s the only way they’ve ever known to get ahead in the world. (The aunt, in the novel, says something along the lines of how if Gigi doesn’t become a rich man’s mistress, all she’d have to look forward to is marriage to some lower civil servant or something.) But Gigi sees all this for the falseness it is, as she tells Gaston and her family (a little more elaborately in the novel)…she’ll be talked about in the newspapers and have everyone in Gaston’s circle sharpen their claws on her, and when the affair ends, she’ll have nothing else to fall back on but becoming another wealthy man’s mistress. She only agrees to go along with it because she loves Gaston and “would rather be miserable with him than without him.”
But during their evening at Maxim’s, Gaston sees what the end result of all this would be…Gigi behaves like the perfect mistress, just as her great-aunt, who sees it all as a business transaction, taught her. She makes all the “right” moves, says all the “right” things, receives his jewelry in the “right” way…in short, she’s become just like Liane, just like the rest of them. And Gaston realizes that to force Gigi into this life would be to destroy what he loved most about her–her honesty, her genuine emotion.
And so, he breaks social convention and asks to marry her–a girl from outside his class. Not a marriage of convenience between fortunes, but a marriage based on true emotion and true honesty.
I read someplace–and I’m not sure I disagree–that some commentators think Gigi’s ending has it all over My Fair Lady’s, because it’s the man who has to meet the woman halfway instead of (as some see MFL’s ending) the woman coming back to the man despite the fact that he hasn’t made any attempt to atone for his past jerkiness.
Now, the age difference may be a little disconcerting–but back in the Belle Epoque age when this takes place, such age differences in marriage weren’t uncommon at all. And it’s not like Gaston’s some dirty old man like his uncle (however charming Honore is)…he’s only in his late twenties/early thirties at the most!
You’re aware, I presume, that this ending was tacked onto MFL (and the film version of ***Pygmalion ***as well) against the express wishes of the author. The play ends with Liza walking out on Higgins, almost certainly forever (quite rightly, IMHO).
Wonderful analysis (and defense) of Gigi, BTW.
Piggy ends with Liza and Freddie falling hopelessly in love and shocking everyone.
According to Shaw’s notes, that’s what happened.
Actually, that wasn’t a Peter Wimsey story, it was a Montague Egg story, by the same author.
Monty Egg was a traveling salesman, representing a wine company. His stories allowed Ms. Sayers to play with lower-middle-class characters, for a change.
Really, who has more cred in matters involving sex: Colette or GBS?
40 years ago I played Freddie in a high school production. I seem to remember we didn’t put that part on, maybe it was an epilogue. Didn’t get to kiss Liza either. Lame production.
Ah, thanks =)
Well, it was in a compendium of Peter Wimsey stories I downloaded off Project Gutenburg, almost all of them were Wimsey stories … though i wouldn’t mind some Bunter oriented stuff. Not overly fond of the nephew though - what a pratt.
On second thought, I’ll spoiler tag this. [spoiler]Yeah, don’t worry too much about him… he didn’t survive the Battle of Britain.
(per Ms. Sayers, in published correspondence.)[/spoiler]
“Merci, merci, Dodge Monaco, a great new car that you should know” performed in French-accented Sprechstimme to the tune of the Singing Nun’s Domi-Neeka Neeka goddamn NEEKA—a song which I will never be able to hear again after hearing it over and over during American Horror Theater Asylum, in some of the horroriest scenes no less. That series formed the dark, seamy underside to the world of The Trouble with Angels, which actually was filmed that year 1964, which Mom took me to see when I was 5. But its horrors were woven of The Magdalene Sisters crossed with Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel-Dieu Nunnery and any manner of torture horror, which I avoid, so I don’t know that enough to compare it with anything except maybe Grand Guignol. It sucks that the tune Louis Jourdan sang in that '70s car commercial is now associated with torture horror set in the time of my real childhood—if I hear that song again, I hope it isn’t too triggery. If I never hear that song again, it’ll be too soon.
Correction: the movie was filmed in 1965 and Mom took me to see it when I was 6.