Cinema: Leg of Dinosaur

Gigot. Ugh. In the middle of the cellar sits a mighty peculiar pile of something. Could it be an igloo of grease? Or maybe a Volkswagen wearing pajamas? All at once a face comes out of it, and what a face! The features are covered with hair, the hair is covered with dirt. But just as the customers are about to scream, the monster waddles comically across the floor and revolves a massive iron wheel that looks as if it opened at least a sluiceway in Grand Coulee Dam. The pipe roars like Niagara, and from the end of it rushes—a dribble. With a cake of hope the monster airily washes its face. With a burlap bag it daintily towels off and, turning to the camera, presents:

Jackie Gleason. Yessiree, the monster is none other than that ton of fun from television who in The Hustler scored as Minnesota Fats, a pool shark who looked like a whale with a carnation. In Gigot he scores again as Gigot, a Parisian janitor whose name means leg of mutton but who looks more like leg of dinosaur.

Poor Gigot. He is not very bright, and he is literally dumb. He seldom has a soul, but he has a heart of gold. People hoot and holler at him when he walks into a bistro—he smiles at them shyly. Children pin tails on the poor donkey—he never gets mad. But he longs to be a member of humanity, and one day he discovers the only place where he is accepted by other people: in a cemetery. After that, Gigot never misses a funeral. He stands at the graveside, shoulder to shoulder with the mourners, and weeps a hatful for the dear departed. What a pity, he thinks, that he had to die—I wonder who he was?

In a word, Gigot is a weeper. If Comedian Gleason has his way—and he apparently had his way with John Patrick’s script and Gene Kelly’s direction—movie houses will have to supply their ushers with rowboats. Fortunately, though, the sniffles are frequently punctuated with snickers, and now and then with a button-popping belly laugh. Gleason has a gift of mimicry that verges on genius, and there are moments in this movie when the thin man struggling to get out of the fat man seems to be Charlie Chaplin.