20 Most Perfect Scenes In Cinema History

Famously adapted by Steve Martin himself (over an agonisingly twenty-five drafts) from Edmond Rostand’s coruscating 1897 play Cyrano De Bergerac, the 1987 version is a far more faithful adaptation than the trappings of the romantic comedy suggest.

As in the play, the central character is a larger-than life personality, charismatic, literate and funny, struck by a single flaw that skews his whole worldview: the possession of a bafflingly huge nose.

Rostand’s play brought the word ‘panache’ into the English language. It’s the ideal around which soldier and renaissance man de Bergerac has based his life, and to a large extent this is true of Martin’s dynamic fire chief C.D. Bales as well.

C.D. has a fearsome reputation for violence against people who sneer at his schnoz, a reputation at the forefront of everyone’s minds when, on a night out, a drunken lout calls him “big nose”...

Adapted flawlessly from the version of the same scene in the play, it’s not just the individual gags that make it work, but the relentless quickfire barrage. There are actually twenty-five in all: at nineteen, C.D. asks his captivated audience how many he’s got, but is mistakenly told fourteen.

The real reason for the ‘error’? Martin had simply written too many great jokes.