Eleanor Parker

Voluptuousness is the form of beauty that registers quickest on the eye because in its puffiness we also identify something of the absurd. The first look is always paradoxical. No actress has brought to the screen the living simplicity of this idea better than Eleanor Parker, who is at her most ravishing in Scaramouche (George Sidney, 1952), in which she plays the lovelorn actress, Lenore. A better name could not be imagined for a figure of misplaced passions. Working as the raucous lead player in a comedy troop in pre-revolutionary Paris, she falls in love with her co-star, the dashing Andre-Louis Moreau (Stewart Granger), whose fine swordplay and garish mask earns him the soubriquet ‘Scaramouche’. All goes as well as one who is in love with a restless man can dare to hope for, until he inevitably falls for the more noble charms of Aline de Gavrillac de Bourbon (Janet Leigh). The choice makes you wonder if he is a fighter rather than a lover. Scaramouche is said to have the longest sword fight in film history, between Moreau and his arch enemy, the Marquis de Maynes (Mel Ferrer). It also flirts with revolutionary politics, revenge, betrayal, and incest, but it is happier for you to name those words in your thoughts as you watch rather than to develop their consequences. It’s a swashbuckler, and if the exhuberance of the way it is filmed doesn’t sweep you off your feet then the lush charm and longing gaze of Eleanor Parker surely will. With Scaramouche, Technicolour’s potential to illuminate the vibrant structural detail of the human form is beautifully realised: with pitching red lips and rouged cheeks, wavy auburn hair, and a gorgeous crimson dress that clings timidly to her full figure, it’s entirely forgivable to reason with the film that Lenore could captivate Napoleon Bonaparte. Even Josephine would have marvelled.