Movies Abroad: Magnificent Muttonhead

Dirty, skinny and disdainful, the cat picked its way across the floor to where the great body lay canted on its side, sagging in sleep. The enormous head hung motionless, and the cheeks, which were smeared with sardine oil, glistened invitingly. The cat sniffed, turned, sneered at its audience, and began cleaning its paws.

Sorrowfully, Jackie Gleason heaved himself upright and looked at Gene Kelly. The two are in Paris trying to film a movie called Gigot, about a lovable deaf-mute bum whose best friend is an alley cat. In the first scene, the cat is supposed to hear an alarm clock, wake up, and then rouse his deaf ami by licking his face. But the first dozen Parisian alley cats had flunked their screen tests. Gleason, who plays Gigot, swabbed off the sardine oil and discussed things with Actor-Director Kelly. Importing trained cats from Hollywood would cost almost $10,000, it developed. It was decided to go on with the screen tests. Gleason smeared on more sardine oil.

Cat testing is the kind of nonsense that directors’ assistants have assistants deal with in the U.S. But Gleason, who dreamed up Gigot because “I got fed up with seeing those psychological deals where Tab Hunter falls in love with a goat.” wanted to do the film on location in Paris with French actors and crew.

Six-Bottle Man. French film making is traditionally chaotic, and Gleason is a compulsively active mattress who walks like a man. Their collision has resulted in a good deal of confusion and. somewhat surprisingly, a respectable amount of progress. During a typical day Gleason may record a song (he has also written the film’s music), chat with Ambassador James Gavin, get his three-day bum’s beard trimmed with special three-day-beard scissors, and audition little girls to play opposite Gigot (the female “lead must speak English with a slight French accent and be five to eight years old). Gleason’s role is pantomime, and must be choreographed for the benefit of lighting technicians and carpenters. Kelly will lead him through part of it (“You’re walking down a street, you see a little girl, you see a bird”). Then the partners, with Gleason still in costume, pile into Jackie’s turquoise and Burgundy Rolls (bar, phone, TV, refrigerator, stereo hi fi, air conditioning) and hunt photogenic cemeteries because Gigot is supposed to love funerals.

Francophile Kelly supervises Gleason’s workaday lunches and explains: “I just order what I think would be a decent meal for three men, and when it’s not enough, I order more.” For working booze (“Whisky is for fun”) Jackie absorbs six bottles a day of ruby-red Nuits-Saint-Georges—chilled, to the frigid disapproval of the Nuits-Saint-Georges bottlers.

Alp, Alp. Gleason. of course, is primarily a TV clown in the U.S., and he is not well known to the French. Jackie professes to enjoy his place in the shade, and claims that “as soon as I get a day off, I’m going to a department store. I haven’t dared go near one in years.” But the anonymity is not likely to last. After a difficult day, Gleason issued from his penthouse at the George V looking, in spotless maroon jacket and pink shirt, like an Alp covered with wild flowers. He proceeded to the Olympia Music Hall, where his jazzbo buddies Pee Wee Russell and Buck Clayton were playing. Clayton dragged him onstage, and Gleason, whose French is limited to “encore doo van,” got howls with a Gallic doubletalk routine. Later, he joked with French Clown Jacques Tati and wandered off to find late-evening brandy with his jazzmen and some 50 new fans.

So far, however, Parisians have obstinately refused to dig one aspect of Gleason’s traveling circus: its title. Gigot was suggested by U.S. Crooner Andy Russell, a friend of Gleason who speaks restaurant French, when Jackie asked what one might call “a poor soul who just sort of lambs around.” The trouble is that Russell was too literal-minded; gigot means merely “leg of mutton,” and bilingual Frenchmen are wondering in some puzzlement whether Americans would laugh if Tati, for instance, made a movie in the U.S. and called himself “Rolled Rib Roast.”