Jackie Gleason is front & center in this passion project (he came up w/the story & music) from 1962. Gleason is a Parisian janitor & a mute who's the butt of the joke in the neighborhood since he lives a spartan existence (working at a loss, since his domineering boss docks his pay for all his mistakes taking his meager earnings to buy broken cookies to feed the animals in town & partaking in the occasional funeral service as a means of quelling his soul) but that all changes when he encounters on a rainy night a woman & her young daughter who he hurries to his warm basement flat where after a time they become a defacto family. Not knowing (or even understanding?) the mother is a prostitute becomes an uncomfortable reality when he defends her honor only to be castigated for stepping up in the first place. Trying to do the right thing, Gleason robs a bakery (the till was left unattended) to provide his new charges w/much needed clothing & sustenance but when the mother's old pimp comes a-calling & the daughter is hurt in a cellar collapse, will the hard scrabble janitor get the happy ending he deserves? This is a film that had me torn since you can see Gleason & by extension, director Gene Kelly, have crafted something out of Jacques Tati's id but rather than laughing w/Gigot, the characters are constantly laughing at him w/Gleason not doing anyone any favors by making his creation a dancing, prancing buffoon who gains audience sympathy only when he entertains the neglected waif. Other than that it's more of showcase for Gleason (he was nominated for his efforts) to show his ingenuity for playing a wordless character which gets let down by the film's insistence to have it both ways.
