The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

(On Cable TV, March 2021) At some point, I’ll have to dig deeper into the quasi-magical link between Hollywood and Paris. More than any other non-Anglophone European Capital (even Rome, which became an adjunct Hollywood for a time!), Paris shows up at an amazing frequency in the classic Hollywood imagination — a city where American GIs could return to after the war, a place of a thousand romances and a town where art reigned supreme. As the title suggests, The Last Time I Saw Paris fully plays into these stereotypes as backdrop for a thoroughly 1950s melodrama. Here we have a WW2 journalist turning to novel-writing as he takes in la belle vie, but things can’t be happy for too long as oil money, adultery and death-by-pneumonia strike our characters. It’s all wild and woolly and unrealistic to the Nth degree and that’s part of the film’s charm. Even if you don’t like the result, you can at least feast upon a young and vivacious Elizabeth Taylor, easily stealing the film from would-be lead Van Johnson, Walter Pidgeon and Donna Reed—plus a very young Roger Moore as an adulterous suitor. The Paris backdrop is used as effectively as it could for studio-shot films of the era, but we’re still very much in an American fantasy of Paris. The Last Time I Saw Paris is not an uninteresting film, but it’s probably now best appreciated on a semi-ironic register in considering anything aside from Taylor’s presence.