Redwarmin This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

TxMike I was 14 when this movie came out. I never saw it back then but thanks to the marvels of modern TV I was able to catch it on the "Movies!" channel. Watching it is fun to see how much movie-making has changed over my lifetime. Even though most of the characters are Parisian French they speak in American English. Filmmakers just wouldn't do that today.Frank Sinatra, about 44, was in the featured role as Durnais. But my favorite is Shirley MacLaine, about 25, as Simone Pistache. She was the owner and operator of the Parisian nightspot where lady dancers did the illegal, they raised their skirts while dancing to reveal the petticoats underneath. So much of the story is local puritans trying to prosecute and close down the nightspot, while François was trying to romance Simone.One of my long time favorites, dancer Juliet Prowse, has a role as Claudine, and of course she is the featured dancer in production numbers. But MacLaine also shows us that she can dance also, because that is how she got started in show business.All meaningless fluff but good entertainment. It was good to also see great French actors, Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan.

MartinHafer Reading through the reviews for "Can-Can" is a strange experience as they are all over the place. Some loved it and give it glowing reviews and just as many hated it. It's a bit unusual to see such divergent reviews and my assessment of the film is somewhere in the middle--it's not a good nor a bad film--just a second-rate musical that isn't bad as a time-passer.When the film begins, most viewers will probably be surprised to see Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra in the leads. This is because the film is set in Paris and they are about as French as gefilte fish! This inappropriate casting is made more obvious since Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier are 3rd and 4th billed! So, automatically, the film loses a point for such poor casting. It's a shame, but Hollywood SHOULD have been more focused on appropriate casting than on getting big-name stars--problems that did NOT plague a much better musical from the same period, "Gigi" (which starred Jourdan and Chevalier among others).MacLaine plays Simone--a woman who runs a night club in Montmartre (a district in Paris known for its adult entertainment). Her place has gotten in trouble for having Can-Can dancers*--and police have vowed to arrest her if they put on that wicked dance again. Well, eventually this does occur, although the charges are soon dropped by the prosecutor, Philipe (Jourdan). Why? Because Philipe has fallen in love with her and wants to marry her. This is a VERY weak aspect of the film, as the upper-class Philipe doesn't even know this lady--so why would he be willing to destroy his career for a dance hall girl?! Eventually, Simone agrees to marry Philipe. However, Philipe's friend (Chevalier) and Simone's ex-lover, François (Sinatra) don't want the marriage to occur and so they conspire to break up the couple. They invite the cream of society to an engagement party, get Simone drunk and get her to entertain her guests. Well, although Philipe STILL inexplicably wants to marry her, Simone is determined to end this relationship.As for François, his character is...well...annoying. He wants Simone but is very honest in his wicked intentions. He has no desire to marry her but wants her, so he breaks up her marriage. This is pretty sleazy and the song he sings about this is pretty nasty as well. So, because of this, the film's ending REALLY made no sense at all...none.In addition to a confusing and occasionally unbelievable plot, the film features a very mixed bag of music. Some is great--such as "It's All Right With Me" and "You Do Something to Me". However, much of the rest of the music is sub-par--particularly the lyrics. It's like they got Cole Porter's second-best not his best for this movie.As for the dancing, this was VERY odd. Despite the title of the film, there is almost no Can-Can dancing in the film. However, and this just shows you how out of touch Hollywood could be, there is LOTS of modern dance--the sort of stuff you'd NEVER see in 1898. In particular, the violent dance number involving the knife is pure Hollywood and has no place in the film, though there are several other numbers that just don't belong in the movie.Overall, the film is a seriously mixed bag. The plot isn't terrible but it often makes little sense, the songs range from awful to terrific and the dance numbers often aren't appropriate to the film. I think it's a tepid little film that SHOULD have been much better.*According to IMDb trivia, the reason the Can-Can was so scandalous was because the dancing girls did NOT wear underwear. Although Wikipedia can occasionally be unreliable, it insists that this is an urban legend and the dancers certainly DID wear underwear.

MARIO GAUCI This is another film which was often shown on TV (twice on the local channel alone!) but I hadn’t bothered with until now; it’s recently been released as a 2-Disc Set by Fox but, in view of its middling reputation, opted to acquire the film by itself.To begin with, the DVD presentation had its good and bad points: the film was made available in its “Roadshow Version” – running 142 minutes against the “General Release Version” which eliminated 11 minutes of extraneous music (Overture, Intermission, Entr’ Acte and Exit Music); unfortunately, time seems to have taken its toll on the negative as there were several instances of color fluctuation throughout! As can be surmised, I decided to give the film a whirl as part of my ongoing marathon to commemorate the 10th anniversary from the passing of its male lead – Frank Sinatra; curiously enough, given his reputation as one of the foremost American singers, he appeared in few vintage musicals over the years…and it’s certainly a tribute to his acting talent that his non-musical work (often in hard-hitting, even groundbreaking films) has tended to overshadow this more familiar aspect of his personality – at least on the silver screen! Anyway, to get back to the film proper: I found it quite engaging and its considerable length not overly taxing – and this, to a large degree, is thanks to the formidable star cast (which, apart from Sinatra, included Shirley MacLaine, Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan). The first two had already appeared together – albeit in dramatic roles – in SOME CAME RUNNING (1958), while the others had been wonderfully teamed in the same genre and a similar ambiance in GIGI (1958). Ironically, both these films were helmed by a master stylist – Vincente Minnelli…so, perhaps, Fox should have struck a deal with MGM to acquire his services for CAN-CAN – but, given director Lang’s previous musical success with THE KING AND I (1956), they obviously thought he could do no wrong. The fact is that his handling is sterile and more accommodating to the Widescreen ratio than the necessities of the plot and characters – filming events from a distance and rarely cutting or even moving the camera; this lazy approach (which still landed him a nomination from the Directors' Guild Of America!) is doubly frustrating when viewed on a small screen!! Apparently, the production went through a lot of script changes (Sinatra’s role, reportedly, wasn’t even in the stage original to begin with!), songs were dropped and replaced by other Cole Porter standards which don’t really fit in (such as Jourdan’s “You Do Something To Me”); the rest of the soundtrack isn’t particularly outstanding (unlike that of GIGI, for instance) but a number of tunes are cleverly reprised (sometimes with variations and by different characters) during the course of the film. It was nice, too, seeing two world-renowned singers with such different styles as Sinatra and Chevalier come together (and having fun with it); Chevalier and Jourdan’s roles, then, are virtual carbon copies of their GIGI characterizations – but it’s a formula that seems to work (even if it’s not as central to the main plot this time around, Jourdan having been relegated to The Other Man type).MacLaine did few musicals as well but her vivaciousness (as a dancer and owner of an establishment which finds itself frequently in trouble with the law over the forbidden “Can-Can” dance, but who manages to charm the stuffy judge at the trial) ensures that her numbers emerge as the show’s highlights: the Apache Dance, the drunken recital of a vulgar song at her engagement party to Jourdan (at the instigation of lawyer Sinatra, who loves her but is unwilling to commit himself) and the “Garden Of Eden” sequence (intended to demonstrate that “Sin wasn’t invented in Montmartre – it was only perfected there”!). Two other important figures (though both severely underwritten) are those played by Juliet Prowse and Frenchman Marcel Dalio as the nervous but devoted manager of the “Bal De Paradis” (the latter was a versatile actor in his native land, but he was stuck with this kind of unrewarding role during his long tenure in Hollywood!); the former appears as a leading dancer at the club and MacLaine’s prospective rival – interestingly, the two actresses’ physiognomies are strikingly similar – for Sinatra’s attentions (a situation which is indirectly played upon during the afore-mentioned “Garden Of Eden” number, apart from which they’re teamed for the climactic Can-Can performance…to the predictable enthusiasm of the formerly disapproving head of a female Legion Of Decency-type group).In the end, while this film can’t be considered a classic musical as such, it still seems to me to have been unfairly maligned – as some fantastic talent has been assembled in the service of a charming (albeit unsurprising) narrative to provide colorful (if uninspired) entertainment which the genre was capable of during its studio-system heyday…

maksquibs A recent NYC concert version of CAN-CAN (w/ a superb Patti LaPone) revealed a reasonably sturdy book & an underrated late Cole Porter score. Where had it been hiding all these years? Perhaps the vanishing act can be blamed on this inept film version which mangles the plot, throws away two-thirds of the score (even 'I Love Paris' is stiffed) and has all the French flavor of a Burger King croissant. Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier show up to provide Gallic seasoning (Jourdan does his numbers charmingly and has far more rapport with Shirley MacLaine than his victorious rival, Frank Sinatra, while Chevalier's intro to 'Just One of Those Things' is the best thing in the film), but Minnelli's GIGI, Huston's MOULIN ROUGE and Renoir's FRENCH CAN CAN are each in their own way infinitely superior to this malarkey.NOTE: It takes a lot of chutzpah to include a DVD-extra tribute to writer Abe Burrows on a pic that utterly trashes his work on the original stage show.