Starring: Elizabeth Taylor, Van Johnson, Walter Pidgeon, Donna Reed, Eva Gabor Directed By: Richard Brooks Average Rating: Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Binding: DVD Format: Color, Closed-captioned Label: Alpha Video Number of Items: 1 Region Code: 1 Release Date: March 19, 2002 Running Time: 116 minutes Theatrical Release Date: 1954
Quality bad, story is good... The movie centers around Charles (Johnson), who gets back from the war and falls in love with a woman in Paris, Helen (Taylor) who's a fellow American. Her sister Marion (Reed) is in love with him, but he marries Helen, never knowing Marion loves him. In turn, she marries a man named Claude.
As time goes on, the marriage between Charles and Helen gets stale; they both flirt with and date others; he becomes a frustrated writer who can't get work and drinks. His drinking eventually has a tragic consequence that I won't reveal, but he leaves Paris and returns two years later to find his daughter. Very sad movie with a bittersweet ending.
My complaint with the movie is that it needs to be remastered. But the story is excellent and worth seeing more than once.
F. Scott Fitzgerald it ain't, but we'll take our swoony Bad Movie swill where we can get it. Embittered expatriate novelist Van Johnson - who surely would have been our choice to play a surrogate for embittered, self-tortured expatriate F. Scott Fitzgerald - wanders scenic postwar Parisian locals mourning dead Elizabeth Taylor. Wherever he roams, someone is warbling the title song, THEIR song.
Wandering into a bistro, THEIR bistro, Johnson encounters all-purpose ethnic barman Kurt Kaszner, who reminds Johnson of those glorious wartime days and nights. "Maybe we had too many laughs, Maurice," reminisces Johnson (and so may you) when he then tumbles into Flashbackland, where, among throngs of celebrants as World War II ends, he meets Donna Reed - who looks him straight in the eye and toasts, "To men!" She invites Johnson to a gala party hosted by her rakish, ne'er do well father, Walter Pidgeon, and gorgeous sister, Taylor, who kisses him and asks, Do you think someday soon you might be rich?" Reed, accustomed to losing beaux to Liz, instead weds George Dolenz, leaving Liz and Van to tie the knot and birth a daughter who grows up to be the sort of cher enfante who speaks breathy Franglais and scampers around in toe-shoes.
Johnson plugs away writing novels that publishers reject, so at a Beaux Arts ball, Pidgeon counsels, clearly hip to the secret of movies like this, "Would you like to know the secret of success? Mediocrity, my boy. To be a rich writer, you've got to remember your three R's: riches, ruffians, and rape."
Things go sour when Liz takes up with tennis pro Roger Moore in retaliation for Johnson's taking up with the much-married Eva Gabor who, on meeting him at a bar for an interview, announces, "I haven't picked out my next husband yet - might be the bartender - at least he has talent." Taylor asks hubby Johnson about paramour Moore, "How do you like him? Don't you think he makes me look years drunker?"
Liz and Van grow more beautiful and dissolute - he can't write a word, see, he's too busy driving racecars in Monte Carlo - until she pleads that he return with her to America. "Let's go back before we crack up!" she says throbbingly, and you'll crack up right along with them as the stars sweat in vain to convey the sense of loss, pain, and anguish of the Fitzgerald tome on which the movie is based. But damned if you'll be able to control your tear ducts when Taylor, dying of pneumonia, whispers to Johnson about their daughter, "Take care of Vickie. Don't let Vickie make the same mistakes. I'll always love you." Fitzgerald it ain't, but we'll take our swoony swill where we can get it.
Directed by Richard Brooks from Fitzgerald's BABYLON REVISITED.
Badly in need of restoration The cinematographer for this film was the legendary four-time Oscar winner Joseph Ruttenberg. But sadly the film has suffered greatly over time, and was not restored before being digitized for DVD. Throughout the film, the color and brightness constantly change and flicker, to the point of being very distracting, not to mention disappointing. The storyline is a bit of a soap opera, made enjoyable by terrific actors and the wonderful Parisian scenery. But sadly, the deterioration of the film saps it of its vitality. I hope that one day it will be restored.
5 stars for the movie not the transfer I can't believe how many versions of "The Last Time I Saw Paris" there are and yet NONE are in widescreen and none seem to be a good digital transfer! I can't image what's up with this movie! The movie itself has a great storyline and Elzabeth Taylor looks hotter than ever! Worth watching but can't understand why this movie keeps being shortchanged over and over again!
The movie betrayed the dry-eyed spirit of the original material... "The Last Time I Saw Paris" converted the author's sensibility downward, to compassion and soap opera... The movie therefore betrayed the dry-eyed spirit of the original material... The first mistake, though, was in changing the era from the Lost Generation Twenties to post-World War II... The jazz age ambiance, recollected in the story, the mystique of Paris in the Twenties--these key tokens of Fitzgerald's sensibility were missing...
Even more damaging than the switch in era is the attempt to expand the characters whose motivations are only sketched lightly in the short story... Told in flashback, the story centers on a successful American novelist (Van Johnson) who returns to Paris and a reunion with the child he left in the custody of his sister-in-law (Donna Reed), since the death of his wife...
The movie and the actors do not move the characters from point A to point B: why, for instance, do husband and wife reverse roles, she transformed from party girl to sober wife who wants to go home to America, he collapsing from serious writer to disappointed drunk...
Van Johnson lacks the mythic stature to suggest other than a poor man's version of the great, doomed Fitzgerald... And Liz was too young and inexperienced at the time to embody an arch-neurotic, part a malicious temptress, and part an aiding angel...
The role is a cumulation of the Taylor ingénue: the goodtime flirt, cunningly stealing a man from her older sister; the spoiled daughter of a fast living phony; the irresponsible party girl with a good heart underneath it all; the sober young mother and wife; the defiant adulteress; the frail spirit cut down by the forces of nature...
At each "station," she is on home ground, but the part comes out in bits and pieces rather than a coherent whole: the character, finally, does not add up... It may be partly Taylor vapidity (Beverly Hills didn't prepare her for Paris), but it's also the script and the direction: that saintly woman, forgiving all, has very little connection to the blithe spirit who steals her sister's man and parties with non-stop frenzy...
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