José Ferrer won a Tony Award in 1947 for his Broadway performance of Cyrano de Bergerac. Three years later, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in Cyrano de Bergerac, a fairly faithful adaptation of that play. Ferrer was the first Hispanic actor to win an Oscar, and I wonder how many more Tony-Oscar winners there are of the same role.

The supporting players are nothing special, and the film was made in a hurry with limited sets, reflecting the accurate notion that a 1950 American audience would not be drawn to a title it couldn’t pronounce. Ferrer’s amazing work lifts this movie above all that to its high position in the Internet Archive Top 100.