The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

Excellent but underrated film

The first must-see film of the year.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Snoozy melodrama has two redeeming values -- The director repeatedly found a way to show Elizabeth Taylor barely dressed. Liz in full Technicolor negligees is probably worth 5 stars all on its own, frankly. At one point she looks in a full-length mirror and moans, ''I'll never be a size 10 again.'' Sadly, she was right. There's a bonus for fans of Young Frankenstein. About half way through The Last Time I Slept In Paris, who shows up but Eva Gabor with her turned-up nose, breathy lisp and - yes, after she changes for dinner - a blue taffeta dress. RIP Madeleine Kahn. Problem is shortly thereafter Liz and the inexplicably popular Van Johnson discover they're rich thanks to some oil wells and -- Liz hacks off her beautiful hair to resemble pixie Shirley MacLaine. Not that there's anything wrong with that when you're Shirley MacLaine, but why would Liz Taylor do so? So the producers could show the passage of time? Bad idea. Hack Van Johnson - filthy rich and married to Elixabeth Taylor - whines b/c publishers hate his writing. What an insufferable loser. Watch for Liz tearing a sheet of paper from Van's typewriter and seeing the nonsense he's written - shades of Jacko in The Shining. And lastly - holy smokes - Roger Moore was ridiculously good looking. Van Johnson might as well have just walked off the movie set right then and there.

The Last Time I Saw Paris won't be everybody's cup of tea, but while it could have been much better I do not consider it a bad film. If anything it was an uneven but decent one. The ending did feel very forced and at odds with the mood of the rest of the film, there could have been more of a focus on the relationship between Helen and Charles, Van Johnson does start off a tad uncomfortable and his drunken argument with himself is pretty embarrassing and some of the film feels skimming the surface quality and lacking in depth with a dose of over-sentimentality. The film is also in serious need of a restoration, the faded, grainy print doesn't do it justice. But for all its flaws, The Last Time I Saw Paris has much to like and the good stuff is beautiful and charming indeed. The sets have a painterly charm and the Parisian location is irresistible(Paris has always been one of the most beautiful and romantic cities in the world, and couldn't have been a more perfect choice of location for this film) while the cinematography from Joseph Ruttenberg has a real intricacy, matching the mood and nostalgic atmosphere most fittingly, and Helen Rose's dresses are sumptuous in every sense of the word, especially Elizabeth Taylor's lavender dress which goes perfectly with her violet eyes. Conrad Salinger haunting and lush music score, a script despite the lack of depth that is intelligently, poignantly and wittily written- the car race is hilarious- and a story that has a fair amount of nostalgic charm and emotional resonance especially in the first half are also things to like. The direction is leisurely but not overly so, letting the film speak for itself, the characters are sympathetically drawn and likable although Charles is the only one who's really developed. And The Last Time I Saw Paris is also beautifully cast and beautifully played, especially by a luminous Elizabeth Taylor who brings sublime subtlety and nuances to her role an amusingly eccentric and endearingly roguish Walter Pidgeon. George Dolenz and Eva Gabor are also solid, Donna Reed is excellent in an atypical role and Sandy Descher proves herself to be an adorable child actress. Johnson may not start off well but the more interesting Charles gets the more comfortable and emotionally involved Johnson becomes, with his increasingly brooding, intense and affecting performance being one of the saving graces of the second half. Stylistically and tonally the film is true to F. Scott Fitzgerald's story Babylon Revisited despite the updating, but the story despite like the film having a weaker latter half had much more depth to the story and the characters more compelling in development and motivations. In conclusion, very flawed but also has a lot of charms, worth the watch. 6.5/10 Bethany Cox

Reason # 1 - Lousy casting. "The Last Time I Saw Paris" is an expansion of F Scott Fitzgerald's elegiac short story "Babylon Revisited," a lightly fictionalized depiction of the aftermath of Fitzgerald's marriage to Zelda. If MGM stretching a melancholy, intimate portrait of a flawed man into a feature-length romantic extravaganza was a bad idea, casting Van Johnson as the Fitzgerald character was a worse one. Charles Wills, the Fitzgerald stand-in, is a journalist who marries a beautiful but impulsive debutante in Paris right after World War II, lapses into drunken self-loathing after writing a few failed novels, and wastes his wife's inheritance on the way to becoming a puffy, alcoholic playboy. Johnson is certainly believable as a spineless gigolo, but he's too light in his loafers to play an angry husband and too light in the head to play a brilliant, tortured artist. Plus, he was in his late thirties by the time all this celluloid was wasted, so his celebrated boyish good looks were turning flabby. Thus, there's no reason Charles would attract two hot prospects like Liz Taylor and Donna Reed, the expatriate sisters who fight for the pudgy pretty boy's love in post- WWII Paris. Liz wins, of course, and while she's not bad as Wills' erratic wife Helen, she didn't have the acting chops to connect her character's wild, fountain-swimming side and hurt, vulnerable, wronged- wife side. At least she's having a lot more fun than poor Donna Reed, another beautiful actress hagged up to make Liz Taylor even prettier (I don't think Shelley Winters ever forgave George Stevens for frowzing her up in "A Place in the Sun"). The normally effervescent Miss Reed is asked to play Helen's repressed, embittered sister, and just in case she didn't get the hint that her character was emotionally distant, the studio decided to style and costume her like a constipated schoolmarm. Why MGM would waste an Oscar-winning knockout like Reed on such a drab, thankless role indicates some discombobulated priorities. Veteran actor Walter Pidgeon, as Liz and Donna's penniless bon vivant father, manages to project the necessary seedy charm, but since that's all he has to do, his near-constant presence makes him a well-manicured bore. Compounding the absurdity is Zsa Zsa Gabor, who by 1954 already looked like she'd just emerged from her seventh face-lift, wandering on screen as a wealthy socialite who has a tryst with Charles (why not just cast a drag queen - - it's Van Johnson, after all!). Van and Liz also manage to conceive a daughter, the most saccharine movie child this side of a Disney flick. The whole thing is a mess.Reason # 2 - Profligacy. Thousands of extras wander across the MGM soundstages intended to replicate post-WWII Paris. What could have been a sad, intimate portrait of two flawed people in love becomes an overlong Technicolor extravaganza of crowd scenes, party scenes, racetrack scenes, and one Monte Carlo Grand Prix auto race just to impede character development. At one point, the MGM costume department puts Johnson in a harlequin costume. The point?

If you've been reading my reviews under my username for the last several weeks, you probably know that I've been commenting on various previous films of the cast of the original "Dallas" in chronological order during that time. So it is here that I finally watched this long-in-public-domain M-G-M feature that starred Van Johnson and Elizabeth Taylor with Donna Reed-the second Miss Ellie on that soap-among the supporting cast. In another coincidence that I appreciated while watching, there was a scene where the father of Donna and Elizabeth mentioned investing in some oil wells from Texas that turned out to be useless but later on became the opposite. And it was Ms. Reed's character who made the "useless" statement! Otherwise, I liked this drama about Johnson and Ms. Taylor's romance and later marriage that threatened to fall into the rocks when they both take possible paramours in Eva Gabor and Roger Moore, respectively. As for Ms. Reed, she doesn't seem much use as Ms. Taylor's sister until her climatic scene with Van Johnson near the end concerning his daughter. Sure, there may not be such a good reason for the ending to occur considering the way certain characters behaved but if one is willing to believe in Second Chances, then this one surely deserved them! So, yeah, that's a recommendation of The Last Time I Saw Paris.