Back in the day when I had a working laserdisc player, one of my favorite sets was a collection billed as The World’s Greatest Animation. Despite that title, it was far from comprehensive and largely limited to fare from the National Film Board of Canada (though they did make a great deal of amazing animation!). Anywho, one of the favorite shorts of both my wife and I was Charades, in which a guy finds himself in a round of the titular game where off-screen characters keep making bizarre guesses, though answers are ridiculously obvious. Finally, he moons the other players and they keep guessing, as if this is a new puzzler, shouting out titles like The Black Hole and The Last Time I Saw Paris. Concerning the latter, the way the line is delivered is especially hilarious.
And so, this may be the most roundabout way anybody has ever come to see that 1954 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson. I’m not sure I otherwise would have watched this overwrought melodrama and I’m not sure my life would have been worse for it.
The film opens in what was then present-day Paris, as Johnson walks around sadly, obviously lamenting something missing since the last time he was there He goes into a café where one wall is taken up with a mural of Taylor stepping in a fountain. This makes Johnson even sadder, and so he saddles up to the counter and starts telling the bartender the story we will see in a flashback which will occupy about 90% of the runtime. Just once, I want a movie told in such a manner, and to a bartender, to have the bottle jockey turn and gesture towards a sign saying there will be an extra charge for flashbacks.
Johnson’s tale of woe will begin in the titular city on the day WWII ended in Europe. He happens to meet Taylor, the daughter in a wealthy family of American expatriates headed by Walter Pidgeon. She is supposedly a wild child, having recently just been kicked out of yet another college. A telling sign is she knows where dad hid the hooch from the Nazis, hitting a particular floorboard in just the right place to make it pop open.
Taylor seems to be mostly having fun in a role that is, frankly, a bit beneath her. Unfortunately, I never fully believed she would fall for Johnson. At first, he is a tad repellent because he’s so overly enthusiastic and optimistic. After they’ve been married for a while and had a daughter (Sandy Descher), he becomes hard-drinking, self-pitying, petty and overly jealous. It’s like he did a bait and switch with his personalities, and I didn’t like either one.
There is something of interest in how her transition from party girl to deadly serious mother overlaps with his slide from being overly cautious to being so reckless that he drives through a fence during a cross-country race he which he inexplicably feels compelled to participate.
In the passenger seat at that time is Eva Gabor, a wealthy and oft-divorced socialite with whom he has a dalliance which threatens his marriage. Not that it justifies his affair, but she already seemed to be too chummy with an impossibly young Roger Moore.
Also in the mix is Donna Reed. Rather too highly billed for what little screen time she has, this deeply bitter character is obviously carrying a torch for Johnson. It is laughable how thoroughly she has suppressed this crush, and her realization of this comes long after it would dawn on even the least self-aware person I know, that being myself. That this newfound awareness drives a critical moment in the climax in ludicrous.
Gabor also isn’t given much to do except play what I suspect was essentially herself. I guess that’s the role she was born to play. Like Taylor in the first half of the film, she at least appears to be having fun. She reconnects with Johnson in Paris while she’s between husbands. He asks her if she has ever had children, to which she replies, ““No, and that is my one contribution to society.” Funny, but that is also how I regard myself and my determination to not have any offspring.
There are glimmers of such sharp dialogue throughout the runtime, as one would expect from Julius Epstein, one of the scribes of Casablanca. Yet some of those lines often scan as a bit out of character or a hair too clever to be believable. Consider this exchange between Taylor’s daughter Descher and the girl’s grandfather: “How do butterflies get in your stomach?” “They’re usually hiding in bubbles of champagne.” Or a drunk Taylor, taking a dig at her husband right in front of him while talking to Moore: “How do you like him? Don’t you think he makes me look years drunker?”
One curious minor element which will likely stick with me is frustrated novelist Johnson’s experiences with publishers. First, the only thing we ever see produced on his typewriter is something along the lines of the output Jack Nicholson is cranking out in The Shining. Then there’s the letters that accompany each returned manuscript, which always have a line about his work being sent back “under a different cover”. I’m hoping there was an industry practice at one time of using some sort of “dunce” or “fail” dust cover that they would put on rejected works. That said, I’m currently working on a book collecting some of my reviews and I’m worried I will be finding that out for myself.
Accompanying the movie on the Warner Archive blu-ray is the Tom & Jerry short Touché, Pussy Cat! You know the one: it’s where Jerry is a “Mouseketeer” who get a new recruit in the form of a diaper-clad little dynamo dropped on his doorstep. Unlike when I was watching The Last Time I Saw Paris, I smiled the entire time I watched this. It may not be the cartoon short Charades, which led me to this disc, but it is the one reason I won’t be passing the disc along to anybody else.
Dir: Richard Brooks
Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Van Johnson, Walter Pidgeon, Donna Reed
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray