The Private Life of Don Juan

Made in London in 1934, The Private Life of Don Juan was Douglas Fairbanks last picture.  Alexander Korda's direction is highly accomplished and the film is lavishly staged, but strangely uninvolving and inert.  The effect arises from the movie's revisionist stance toward its material; the film's raison d'etre is to disenchant its audience and there is something curmudgeonly about the picture's rigor in that respect.  In the film, Don Juan is middle-aged, afflicted with back pain, and has lost his sexual elan -- a matronly lady-innkeeper proposes a marriage of convenience remarking that Don Juan has "no brawn, no looks, no brain...and is no longer a spring chicken."  Worse, the hero has an imitator, a younger man, more adept at "balcony-climbing" who is courting the married ladies of Seville.  When the ersatz Don Juan is cut down in a duel, the real Lothario takes the opportunity to decamp from Seville and, thereby, avoid a woman to whom he is espoused and who has been making various demands on him.  In his new surroundings, Don Juan, disguised as a retired military officer, finds that he has become legendary -- everyone is reading about his exploits in a penny-dreadful called the The Private Life of Don Juan.  When he attempts to seduce a woman, she is invariably reading this chapbook, entirely engrossed in the story, and so, completely distracted and unresponsive to the hero's lovemaking. Escaping disappointing romantic entanglements in his place of refuge, Don Juan returns to Seville to find that his adventures are the town's common currency, dramatized everywhere, and that actors playing the famous lover are ubiquitous -- there are puppet shows, plays, and operas about the great seducer and Don Juan finds himself in the unenviable position of having to compete with himself and his own legend.  Returning to the last woman he kissed in Seville, he visits a glamorous Flamenco dancer who recalls Don Juan's embrace with immense nostalgia and sends flowers daily to his supposed grave -- but she has no time at all for the real man who has become much less than her memories of him.  At the theater, Don Juan stops the show just before the stone Commendatore steps down from his pedestal, the great lover protesting that he is the authentic hero of the story -- no one believes him and he is hooted off the stage.  At last, Don Juan returns to bedroom of the woman that he jilted; she has been patiently awaiting his return.  She boots him out of her house, insisting that he enter her boudoir as of old, by climbing the side of the building and entering over the cast-iron grillwork of her balcony.  Don Juan obediently scurries up a slack, rope ladder, showing for just an instant, Douglas Fairbanks' famous athleticism and, then, the camera pans to the marital bed while the woman triumphantly remarks that all men could be Don Juan if they only attended more diligently to their connubial obligations.  Fairbanks was famous for his gymnastic skills and, in silent movies like The Gaucho, his physical prowess is remarkably.  But by 1934, time had taken its toll and Fairbanks apparently had lost some of his strength and much of his insouciant beauty.  We get to see him effortlessly fencing with an enemy but the kind of spectacular swashbuckling stunts that were Fairbanks' métier in his wildly popular silent films are, by and large, absent from those movie and, so, the audience feels just a bit cheated.  (To keep comparisons from being invidious, the wannabe Don Juan is conspicuously flatfooted and clumsy -- he climbs balconies awkwardly and, when he drops from a height, can't land with Fairbanks' feline grace; instead, he stumbles, staggers, and falls.)  Furthermore, Fairbanks' voice is a little reedy and has braying quality -- he sounds very American, like an over-eager used car salesman.  Alexander Korda is influenced by early Goya, some of whose paintings appear in the background.  Early Goya, in turn, imitated Tiepolo and, so, many of the shots have a rococo prettiness -- this is particularly true of images showing the supernaturally beautiful Merle Oberon pushed on a swing while little clouds like cherubs scoot through the windy heavens.  The sets are large and ornate and, often, overwhelm the rather pallid, cynical action underway in the film.  A late sequence shows the problem with Korda's direction -- we see some kind of nighttime festival in Seville and hordes of extras are running this way and that, many of them carrying banners with grotesque devices:  grinning monsters and colossal simpletons.  One particularly effective and macabre banner shows a fat, grimacing face with mouth wide open and that flag, too good to waste, appears in about half of the shots in the sequence.  It's effective, at first, indeed, even, startling but Korda just keeps repeating shots of the extras charging around under their flag next to clinically-clean and castellated walls -- we don't know what is going on, why the people are running wildly in all directions, and the picturesque banners integral to the scene remain completely mysterious -- it's not clear why the banners are being displayed or what is the purpose of the celebration and so, in the end, this large-scale and expensive sequence just seems futile and completely unnecessary