'Fanfan': After 54 Years, The Swash Still Buckles

"Fanfan la Tulipe" opens with the kind of stuffiness associated with many French films of the 1950s. The credits, resembling a florid longhand, inform us that most of the cast were trained at -- hushed tones -- la Comedie-Francaise. And the narrator sets the stage for this 18th-century action farce with arch drollness, suggesting the Seven Years' War was, for its many principals, little more than a divertissement, in which the only downside was a staggering loss of peasantry.

No sooner have you slumped into your seat, prepared for a dated, almost academic ordeal, when something comes alive -- or more accurately, someone. His name is Gerard Philipe, and as the swashbuckling comic hero of this 1952 film, he's every bit as vital, good-looking and insouciant as Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow.

Fighting words, we know. But Philipe, a much-loved stage and screen actor during and after World War II, was the Johnny Depp of his time. Watch "Fanfan la Tulipe" and the analogy becomes clearer. A good-looking man with charisma, comic timing and an impressive dexterity with the sword, he threatens to rupture the movie's creaky confines -- reminding us of a recent "Pirates of the Caribbean" sequel.

As the Fanfan of the title, Philipe is a Parisian lady-killer whose dalliances with a provincial damsel have forced him into a shotgun wedding. Moments away from this involuntary hitching, Fanfan joins the French army. But there's something more compelling than marital skittishness behind his mobilization. He has just heard -- and believes -- a gypsy's prediction that his military valor will secure the hand of the king's daughter. And it's a testament to our hero's indefatigable innocence that he continues to hope for that destiny, even after learning the fortuneteller (voluptuous '50s star Gina Lollobrigida) is a scam artist hired to seduce men into national service.

"Fanfan" -- unlike the comically moribund 2003 remake that stank up screening rooms at the Cannes festival a few years ago -- follows a delightfully giddy course as its hero pursues his royal dream. (And for the record, Christian-Jaque's 1952 "Fanfan" delighted the Cannes jury, which bestowed him with the runner-up prize for best film, as well as the director's award.) In the loopy convolutions of this scenario, that means riding horses at full tilt, leaping onto stagecoaches and handily dispatching all manner of highway robbers, romantic rivals and king's agents trying to stop him. (How Fanfan ends up fighting his own countrymen, rather than Prussians, is part of the amusing nuttiness.)

Not only do you get a sense of Philipe's professional training, which clearly honed his skills in choreography and movement, but his natural charms. There's a "Candide"-like innocence, for instance, in the way Fanfan -- sentenced to die on the gallows at one point -- turns to a similarly doomed companion and says: "This is my first execution."

That Philipe (who died of liver cancer in his mid-30s) performs so effortlessly, so casually, is the real magic here. You forget about technique and, best of all, you forget you're watching a black-and-white subtitled French movie from the dusty past. Enjoying "Fanfan," one of more than 70 films in Christian-Jaque's prolific and commercially successful career, is like retrieving some forgotten relic from the attic. Blow off the dust, wipe it down with your sleeve and suddenly the past feels exhilaratingly like the present.

Fanfan la Tulipe (93 minutes, in French with subtitles at Landmark's E Street Cinema) is not rated but contains risque elements and period-drama violence.