Roxanne (film)

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Roxanne
Directed by	Fred Schepisi
Written by	Steve Martin
Starring	Steve Martin Daryl Hannah Rick Rossovich Shelley Duvall
Release date(s)	June 19, 1987
Running time	107 min.
Language	English
IMDb profile

Roxanne is a comedy film released in 1987, starring Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah.

It is a modern retelling of the verse play Cyrano de Bergerac, written in 1897 by French author Edmond Rostand. The screenplay was written by Martin.

In the film, Martin plays C.D. Bales, the fire chief in a small American town. Bales is witty, acrobatic, and skilled at many things, but he has a very large nose — actually an unrealistically long one. He loves the beautiful Roxanne Kowalski (Hannah), but she is infatuated with Chris (Rick Rossovich), a handsome but dull fireman. As in the play, Bales is touchy about his perceived ugliness (which he cannot get surgically altered because of a dangerous allergy to anesthetics) and speaks to the object of adoration the only way he can: he writes expressions of love and allows Chris to present them to Roxanne as if they were his own.

Among the side plots in the movie are: C.D. dealing with the incompetence of his volunteer firefighters (whom Chris was brought in to help train), an insult fight between C.D. and a barfly (Ritch Shydner), the appearance of a new comet which Roxanne came to observe, and a cafe owner (Shelley Duvall) that is friends of both C.D. and Roxanne.

Roxanne was filmed in the small Canadian city of Nelson, British Columbia.

[edit] Trivia

In a scene where Roxanne slaps C.D. in the face, Hannah accidentally hits Martin's prosthetic nose, apparently dislodging it. As Martin reaches to his face, otherwise on cue, the viewer can see him fumble with his nose using his fingertips, rather than more naturally holding his assaulted cheek.

In the insult fight scene, C.D. had to come up with twenty unique nose jokes. When C.D. called for a count of jokes in the middle, one of his men said that he was up to 14 jokes; he actually had said 19 at that point. But C.D. did come up with six more anyway, making the actual number of jokes on screen 25. Usually one joke is moved to the end when the movie is put in syndication, covering the final joke: "Dirty: Your name wouldn't happen to be 'Dick', would it?"

This film is number 71 on Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies".

[edit] Memorable quotes

‘I have a dream. It's not a big dream, it's just a little dream. My dream — and I hope you don't find this too crazy — is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire, calling the fire department would actually be a wise thing to do. You can't have people, if their houses are burning down, saying, "Whatever you do, don't call the fire department!" That would be bad.’

— C.D. Bales