From the 1950s: The Last Time I Saw Paris

1954 Romance Drama
From Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Directed by Richard Brooks

Starring

Elizabeth Taylor

Van Johnson

Walter Pidgeon

Donna Reed

Eva Gabor

George Dolenz

Kurt Kasznar

Roger Moore

Sandra Descher

Celia Lovsky

I have always loved sad movies.

It might be said I have an affinity for stories that examine marriages, for Americans living in Paris and for casts as glamorous as this one.  I have always been drawn to the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald (the film is based on his 1930 short story Babylon Revisited) and the films of director Richard Brooks.  It didn't hurt that I've long been charmed by the title which is borrowed from Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's wistful song.

The story opens with Johnson returning to Paris after a three-year absence.  He looks haggard and unhappy.  He is there to reclaim his daughter.  He goes to his favorite bar, Cafe Dhingo, from the old days and while nursing a drink he gazes at the portrait of his late wife that has been drawn on an inside wall of the establishment.  He begins to think about the bad good ol' days.

In flashback we see that he is an American reporter living in Paris to cover the end of the second World War in Europe.  On VE Day he is in the crowded, jubilant streets of the city when Taylor lays a big kiss on him and keeps moving.  There is no doubt he is drawn by her beauty.

Afterwards he goes to Cafe Dhingo where he meets his friend Dolenz who is having a drink with Reed.  The two men met up during the war.  Reed and Johnson enjoy a brief flirtation, something which she never gets over despite ultimately marrying Dolenz.

Reed invites him to the plush family apartment where he meets her father, Pidgeon, who lives the highlife but hasn't a dime to his name.  The two men take a shine to one another.  Johnson then sees Taylor across the room and realizes she is the woman who kissed him earlier on the street.  She is Pidgeon's other daughter.

Though both sisters are beautiful, they couldn't be more unalike.  Reed is serious-minded and wants a husband who is stable and like-minded.  Taylor is like her father in her quest for the next party.

Before long Johnson and Taylor marry. Pidgeon is happy... Reed, of course, is not.  They live with Pidgeon while Johnson toils at a thankless newspaper job and by night attempts to write the great American novel.  Everyone likes his work except the publishers whom he is attempting to woo.  They have a daughter (Descher) whom he adores.

His lack of success in getting his book published takes the wind out of his sails and he becomes increasingly melancholy.  It is here that Taylor becomes more responsible, trying to bolster him while he drinks to dilute his failure.  Then Pidgeon's long-dry Texas oil wells start gushing and the family becomes wealthy.  Pidgeon sees to it that his favorite daughter and son-in-law are rolling in the dough.

Unfortunately that is Johnson's greatest downfall.  He and Taylor party like it's going out of style but Johnson becomes more sullen and disagreeable because now he spends little time at the typewriter.  The once loving marriage starts to crumble.  He becomes an alcoholic and they punish one another with meaningless affairs... him with frequent divorcee Gabor and her with tennis playboy Moore.

All four are at a party when Johnson and Moore trade some unpleasantries and Johnson storms out.  He arrives home, puts the chain on the door and passes out on the staircase.  When Taylor returns home she is unable to get into the house.  It is winter, she is not dressed properly and she walks to her sister's house.

Sadly, she gets pneumonia and dies.  Reed is apoplectic that the drunken Johnson killed her sister.  (She is also, of course, nursing those early wounds.)  She gets custody of her niece.

Now back to current day, Johnson goes to the Reed-Dolenz apartment to visit his daughter.  They go to a park they used to frequent and have a lovely reunion.  The girl wants to live with Johnson as much as he wants her.  But the steely Reed, in spite of his sobriety and a published novel, categorically refuses and Johnson leaves, bereft, and goes to his favorite bar.  Dolenz gives Reed a stern dressing down and the finale, after so much sadness, is quite touching.

Any film directed by Brooks is a better film and yet this glossy romance drama is such an unusual choice for him.  The truth is it was not a choice.  For most of Brooks's early directing career (he had been and still was a writer), he was under contract to MGM.  Here was a man that was destined to be largely a director independent of studio contracts.  It needed to be that way because this intelligent, talented and often belligerent man needed to be his own boss.  He couldn't survive for long under studio dictates and most especially the pretty-in-pastels MGM.  

He detested being assigned to films where he had no choice.  There is no doubt that under other circumstances, the man who would bring us Brute Force, Key Largo, Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry, In Cold Blood, The Professionals and Looking for Mr. Goodbar would even consider for a moment directing The Last Time I Saw Paris.  And yet, he said it wasn't so bad.

He complained that the story was updated (from WWI to WWII) and made far more sentimental than Fitzgerald's original work.  He also didn't like that the father gets the daughter back, something that didn't happen in the original.  

Johnson had always been a ham and goes from bumptious to morbid (subtlety was never his strong suit) but this remains one of my favorites of his roles.  He is the star and has most of the screen time.  If one doesn't care for him, it would be rather difficult to enjoy this film, I should think.  His best scenes are with Descher.  I thought, to the film's detriment, his love scenes with Taylor were rather asexual.

He was always a temperamental actor but after his superb notices for The Caine Mutiny (earlier in the same year as Paris), he brought his high-mindedness to the set.  Descher may have helped with that (he was genuinely fond of her) but in Brooks's world, he was the only one who could be temperamental, so Johnson improved.  Temperament or not, the film remained one of the actor's favorites.

He has one of the film's few comic scenes when after coming home from a date with Gabor, as he climbs the staircase to Taylor, he mockingly goes through an imagined conversation he'll be having with her and plays both roles.  Funny stuff. 

Taylor said it was the film that convinced me I wanted to be an actress instead of yawning my way through parts.  Indeed her early 50s films right before this one were forgettable.  She started the decade well (A Place in the Sun, Father of the Bride) and it certainly ended well (Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer) and for my money she climbed out of the cinematic doldrums with Paris.

Brooks, who was crazy about her and maybe even fell in love with her a little, was bound and determined to get a good performance.  He thought she had the makings of being a top actress (he had no doubt she would be a dazzling movie star) and he was pleased with her performance here and more so when he put her through her paces as Maggie the Cat.

Despite Johnson's one great comic scene, what few laughs there are come from Pidgeon.  Who has a father like this?  Both of his daughters admonish him for his cavalier behavior.  I've always immensely enjoyed Pidgeon.

I think this is one of Reed's best roles, too.  It's hard to believe this is the same actress who starred on television in a syrupy sitcom.  She's gorgeous, tough, damaged, embittered.  She had her own good looks and I got goosebumps watching her and Taylor in the same scene.

In his first movie role, Moore was persuasive as a cad and Gabor was Gabor and always fun.   Descher, a grownup even when she was six, is adorable.

The four lead actors had a good time working together again.  Johnson and Taylor shared the screen three years earlier in The Big Hangover.  This was the third and last pairing of Johnson and Reed (they were in The Human Comedy and Dr. Gillespie's Criminal Case, both 1943).  Pidgeon and Taylor were in Julia Misbehaves, 1948.  This is the last of five big screen collaborations of Johnson and Pidgeon and there's also a TV movie.  All four were longtime MGM employees.

Of course, this being MGM, all technical credits shine.  Special mention to cinematography, art direction, set decoration, costuming and hair styling.  MGM sent a second unit crew to Paris to film exteriors but nary an actor set foot outside of Culver City, California.

The title tune is heard instrumentally throughout the film and is sung several times by Odette.

Fitzgerald, of course, based his story on a real life episode.  He and his wife Zelda were part of the expatriates in the 1920s who ran roughshod over Paris.  His sister and brother-in-law were on the fringe of the group.  He was an alcoholic who endured black holes over his inability to write the next great novel.

In the end, Brooks, despite his criticism of the finished project, felt he'd at least delivered an entertaining film the masses would enjoy.  This mass certainly did.

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