Sunday 19 June 2011

Best Actor 1930: Maurice Chevalier in The Love Parade

Maurice Chevalier received one of his only two nominations for portraying Count Alfred Renard in The Love Parade.

The Love Parade is actually a fairly enjoyable romantic musical comedy about a womanizing Count who must learn to obey his Queen, Louise (Jeanette MacDonald), after he marries her.

As I said in my review of his performance in the Big Pond, Chevalier really is not much of an actor, he really is  a musical performer. The changes of his character are never really expressed by his characterization, but more of rather by just events that occur in the film. Chevalier performances really are never than individualized per film, and his success really matters greatly on the strength of the film, and the ability of the director to properly utilize Chevalier.

This film does properly utilize Chevalier, it knows his limits, as well as his strengths, and how to press and exploit each. Chevalier in this film is charming as usual, and the director knows when and how much of it should be used. Chevalier certainly has some really great charm based scenes in this, as he does singing scenes where he really puts himself into the moment of the scene to great effect, I particularly liked all the joy he put into his song about Paris.

Chevalier is humorous when he needs to be, having the proper comedic timing needed for the role, and although I won't say his chemistry with MacDonald is amazing, it does work well in the context of the film. His whole story involving him accepting his place in the royal household does not require a lot of development but Chevalier still deals with it well enough. Character development really is not the point of his performance though, but it instead it is to be a charming, enjoyable, a true romantic comedy lead, and Chevalier certianly is that in this film.

1 comment:

dinasztie said...

I guess Coleman will win.