Fight Clip Club: Roxanne

I really admire your shoes.

As you may recall from my first FCC proper where I covered the Ballad Duel from the 1990 Cyrano, I am a little obsessed with Cyrano de Bergerac. But my love for the character didn’t start in 1990: it began a couple years earlier with what’s one of the very best translations or adaptations of Cyrano ever penned, 1987’s Roxanne. (In fact, you’ll notice that the playwright of the original, Edmond Rostand, is credited alongside Steve Martin as a writer on this film.)

Now, Steve Martin is a brilliant scholar as well as being a “wild and crazy guy,” and notably has penned excellent dramatic works on their own merit, and is fluent in French. As such, far from being a cutesy or silly rom-com (though it is pretty gosh darn cute), Roxanne is actually a legit translation as well as modernization of the classic play. What Martin did with this screenplay was update the characters, and change the ending, making it a romance instead of a tragedy. In this version, Cyrano isn’t a musketeer, he’s a volunteer fireman (his name is Charlie, not Cyrano, but you can hear the echoes of ‘Cyrano de’ in his nickname ‘C.D.’), and the swordfights for which Cyrano is so known, are transformed into fights with commonly found sports equipment. 

Other scenes from classical Cyrano are paralleled throughout, including the famous decoy balcony scene, the failure of Chris(tian) in trying to woo Roxanne on his own, the big nose, the insult tirade scene… there’s even several lines that are direct translations from the classic play, verbatim. It’s one of my favorite movies in general and certainly one of the best Cyranos you’ll ever see.

Let’s look at the opening sequence into the opening fight. Though no swords appear in this fight, I always show it to my stage combat students as an example of an excellent sword fight. Let’s watch it so you can see why: