The Pajama Game, 1957

THE PAJAMA GAME from 1957 is worth another look too, and great to see it in a good print at last, as there have been some ropey public domain copies around. This is another Broadway musical transferred to the screen and it looks wonderful with all those splashy colours and great staging of those classic numbers. Doris Day replaces Janis Paige from the stage show but most of the other cast including John Raitt (father of singer Bonnie Raitt) are intact from the stage show. Bob Fosse's staging of "Steam Heat" with the great Carol Haney is just perfectly Fosse. Doris (before her PILLOW TALK makeover) has probably her best 1950s moments here. Its another Stanley Donen classic then, as we head off to "Hernando's Hideaway" or that "Once A Year Day" .... 

Employees of the Sleeptite Pajama Factory in Iowa are looking for a whopping seven-and-a-half cent an hour increase and they won't take no for an answer. Babe Williams is their feisty employee representative but she may have found her match in shop superintendent Sid Sorokin. When the two get together they wind up discussing a whole lot more than job actions! 

1957 was certainly a classic year for musicals and I was 11 and enjoying them all on the big screen: also Donen's FUNNY FACE, plus Cukor's LES GIRLS, Mamoulian's SILK STOCKINGS and Sidney's not quite so great PAL JOEY, but it has its moments ...  I need to see 1955's MY SISTER EILEEN now again too, with more Fosse and Tommy Rall as well as Janet Leigh, Betty Garrett and Jack Lemmon. 

A NEW Sound of Music ....

THE SOUND OF MUSIC was one musical I never wanted to see and I successfully avoided it until New Year's Day 1996 when I had to give in and watch it with my then ill partner (he died 2 weeks later) and his mother ..... and ok, I enjoyed it, but it is not my favourite or even favourite Oscar & Hammerstein musical (that would be SOUTH PACIFIC). Far too saccharine - I relished Pauline Kael's famous review at the time, where she muses "Wasn't there one little Von Trapp who did not want to sing on cue with the others or who threw up before having to go on stage?" - or words to that effect; or as "Films and Filming" said: "THE SOUND OF MUSIC is 179 minutes, and the first minute is rather good".  Eleanor Parker was marvellous as the Baroness, she could do a lot with very little.

I also saw the London Palladium production some years ago which starred television discovery Connie Fisher, who was an ideal Maria too. The O&H show was first staged in 1959 with Mary Martin. The 1965 film air again here also on new Year's Day. But now our ITV commercial channel has aired a new production, done 'live' and as my current partner (of 13 years) also loves the show and has done the whole Salzburg thing, I had to sit down and watch it again, and actually liked it a lot, it may be the best production yet. Obviously it could not be opened out like the Robert Wise film with location shooting, but it was nicely done and included the songs, mainly for the Baroness, which were not included in the film. 

Kara Tointon was an ideal Maria - she is a television actress here (EASTENDERS)  and won a series of STRICTLY COME DANCING so is well versed in show business and is quite charming, particularly as her Maria matures. The children were all ok, TV regulars Alexander Armstrong was Max, Mel from the BAKE-OFF was the housekeeper, Katherine Kelly (CORONATION STREET, MR SELFRIDGE) as the Baroness, but Julian Ovendon seemed a tad too young for Von Trapp, though he too matures into the role - he sings at the Proms, was in FOYLES'S WAR and one of Lady Mary's suitors in DOWNTON ABBEY (final episode screens here on Christmas Day - there will be a report) and he stripped for that scene in that revival of MY NIGHT WITH REG at the Donmar, which we saw last year. Maria Friedman is a great mother superior at the convent and sings a convincing "Climb Every Mountain".  So in all, we quite liked it and it adds a new dimension to the well-known show. With David Bamber and Paul Copley. Directed by Mel's sister Coky Giedroyc and Richard Valentine. It is due to be repeated soon.

Getting back to SOUTH PACIFIC, I was wondering why it did not do more for Mitzi Gaynor - its really her last film of note, after that came that dreadful SURPRISE PACKAGE (reviewed a while back, Stanley Donen label), then a forgettable David Niven comedy and her final screen credit in 1963 in a long-forgotten comedy with Kirk Douglas. 
Mitz was a talented hoofer and comedienne who arrived just as musicals were going out of fashion, but she scores in the 1954 THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS (above, relaxing with Marilyn and Ethel), and ANYTHING GOES and she was one of the LES GIRLS with Kay Kendall and Taina Elg in Gene Kelly's dance troupe for Cukor in 1957, one of our favourites here, see label - and then her Nellie Forbush in SOUTH PACIFIC, where she seems ideal - I loved the movie as a kid and it was one of the first soundtrack albums I got. I would not have bought the more well known Doris Day in the role. Mitzi then had a good television career with all her musical specials and, like Debbie Reynolds, is still a game gal now.  
Below: those guys on the island, including muscle boy Ed Fury - ideal rainy day viewing.

Surprise Package, 1960

The surprise is its terrible. This is one 1960 'comedy' that passed me by completely and never surfaced here at all in the last 50 or so years, so when I saw it was on dvd, I had to investigate ... particularly as it was filmed on the Greek island of Rhodes, at Lindos - a place I loved a few years ago and it looks just the same here. But WHY is it in black and white? if they were filming on a Greek island back then, surely they could have ran to colour? 

Stanley Donen had the oddest career directing movies - he is 91 now - I won't even mention SINGIN' IN THE RAIN or SEVEN BRIDES, as I don't care for them much, both very over-rated - but I love 1949's ON THE TOWN and his 1955 ITS ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER, FUNNY FACE in 1957 and THE PAJAMA GAME, DAMN YANKEES in 1958 and also INDISCREET, then he did those 2 odd films with Yul Brynner: ONCE MORE WITH FEELING made in 1959 and released in 1960 after the death of its star Kay Kendall (who died in September 1959). Yul Brynner was the temperamental orchestra conductor and showed, as he does here in 1960, that while effective in epics and dramatic roles, he has no flair for comedy at all. 

Mitzi Gaynor is as delightful as ever - she had the misfortune to come along as musicals were dying out, but scored in THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS in 1954, in ANYTHING GOES, was one of the LES GIRLS in 1957 and probably peaked as Nellie Forbush in SOUTH PACIFIC in 1958. After that she did a forgettable David Niven comedy, this Donen misfire and another forgotten item in 1963 and that was the end of her movie career - fortunately she went into television and cabaret and had some great stage shows over the years, which are camp extravaganzas to see now on YouTube. 

Noel Coward is wonderful here even if he looks bored with the whole thing, He does have a good scene with Mitzi (in a ritzy dress) where they sing and dance the title song. He is the exiled King of Anatolia and Yul is the deported from the USA criminal. It is meant to be a comedy caper about Yul trying to steal the King's crown but is too tedious to go into detail about. Yul, Mitzi and Noel are the whole show here, and of course that Greek scenery - amusing to see Yul and Mitz on donkeys going up the hill to the town's fortress and ancient Greek temple with those great views ..... I did that in 2009. I dare say Donen, Yul and Mitzi had some talks about Kay Kendall as they had recently worked with her, and Noel knew her well too .... Coward had just finished OUR MAN IN HAVANA and had launched himself as a cabaret star in the USA. This film though has reams of dialogue in scenes that go on too long and have one itching to use the fast-forward ... which I did a few times. 

Donen went on to the agreeable THE GRASS IS GREENER and those 60s hits CHARADE, ARABESQUE, TWO FOR THE ROAD and BEDAZZLED (see Donen label), the rest of his output included the dreadful STAIRCASE in 1969 and some 70s misfires like LUCKY LADY and THE LITTLE PRINCE. But he gets trotted out occasionally to comment on his three with Audrey Hepburn or those great 50s musicals. SURPRISE PACKAGE though is one to forget. The dvd blurb hopefully describes it as a "delightful souffle" but zis ees one souffle that has collapsed and fallen flat. 

Its back: Two For The Road

Bliss to have TWO FOR THE ROAD out on dual-format Blu-Ray - it looks even more marvellous. This is what I wrote on it back in 2012:

A return visit to one of 1967's enchantments: Stanley Donen's TWO FOR THE ROAD, with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney making a great romantic team (off camera too it seems...), as they play out Frederick Raphael's witty script. This would be a marvellous Valentine Day treat.

After Hepburn's '50s romances with those older men like Bogart, Fonda, Astaire, Cooper she stepped into the new world of the swinging '60s for this trenchant comedy of marital manners. Ahead of its time in telling the story of her troubled marriage to architect Albert Finney in a non-linear fashion, the film embraces scenes from 12 years of road trips to the South of France. For once, Audrey got to play the bitter aftermath of youthful romance, as a woman who swears when angry and even cheats on her husband. In a big departure for the star, director Stanley Donen (working with Audrey again after FUNNY FACE and CHARADE) made her forego her usual couture wardobes by Givenchy in favor of the latest from such mod designers as Mary Quant and Paco Rabanne. The new look brought Hepburn into a more modern era and contributed to one of her best, and edgiest, performances, as we go back and forth through the years and in those different cars and time periods, right up to the mod swinging 1967 era, as captured by Schlesinger's DARLING and Antonioni's BLOW-UP.

Eleanor Bron and William Daniels are sterling support as the American friends they travel with one year, with their insufferable child, and young Jacqueline Bisset is there as well. It is still a witty charming treat as Raphael, who also scripted DARLING, reworks the fractured romance. Audrey had just done that other '60s treat, the delightful - if rarther overlong HOW TO STEAL A MILLION with that other English heart-throb of the era Peter O'Toole, set in Paris once again - at least half of Hepburn's movies have a French or Parisian setting, so this was of the same but more bittersweet. After this and WAIT UNTIL DARK Hepburn would be away from the screen until that lovely return in Lester's ROBIN AND MARIAN in 1976, when she enchanted us all over again ...

I could rhapsodise about Eleanor Bron at length here and in Donen's BEDAZZLED the next year in 1968 with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore - I love her deadpan Wimpy waitress with the eye-shadow, and of course she was also ideal with The Beatles in HELP and in Ken Russell's WOMEN IN LOVE. I used to see her cycling around town frequently here in London, and she was once shopping next to me at Sainsbury's supermarket in Marylebone.

'60s double bill: Bedazzled by Petulia

I had not seen PETULIA since the '60s and always meant to return to it, so finally I have .... this 1968 comedy drama set in San Francisco is probably the perfect late '60s film, capturing that time and place as perfectly as Antonioni's BLOW-UP sums up the mid-60s in London. And then there is Julie Christie, as mesmerising as ever .... Richard Lester's film fragments the story ("Me and the arch kook Petulia"), Nicolas Roeg shoots it all and John Barry did the score, and we get snippets of Janis Joplin and her band .... how '60s is that ? (Roeg also photographed Christie's FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, FARENHEIT 451 and later directed her in his DON'T LOOK NOW).

 
Sparkling San Franciscan socialite Petulia (Julie Christie) wants an affair. She’s been married six months and hasn’t had one yet. Lucky surgeon and soon-to-be-single Archie (George C Scott) catches her eye and their tentative romance begins. Beneath Petulia’s charming kookiness it becomes clear that her new husband (Richard Chamberlain) is physically abusive.

A film set in late '60s San Francisco is bound to be visually vivid, and PETULIA  is a marvellous-looking movie that makes great use of colour. There are psychedelic light shows accompanying musical appearances by The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin, striking vistas of Bay Area locations and Alcatraz, and the candy-coloured mod fashions of the era.  PETULIA depicts the messy complexity of relationships, one nice scene being where Scott and Petulia encounter each other on those streetcars going in different directions. He is taking his kids to see the penguins, she follows and sits wordlessly as they meet and touch and she departs again .... then there is that long scene between Scott and ex-wife Shirley Knight (doing wonders here, as she did in Lester's 1974 high seas thriller JUGGERNAUT with a role that barely exists on paper) where frustrations spill over .... Chamberlain is cast against type here as the husband who batters his wife to a pulp, so why does she stay with him?

There are plentiful examples of Lester's penchant for absurdist humor, caustic irony, and the sad/funny details of human interaction, and his razor-sharp editing. There is a lot of jumping around in time as we learn the story of Petulia and her abusive husband and the little Mexican boy very slowly over the course of the film.

Lester's '60s movies really are as essential as the decade's Losey, Schlesigner or Richardson movies, and I love his '70s capers too - the MUSKETEERS, ROYAL FLASH etc, as per reviews here (Lester label).

Pauline Kael though did not like it at all, as covered in her essay "Trash, Art and the Movies" (in her GOING STEADY collection), where she has "rarely seen a more disagreeable, a more dislikeable (or bloodier) movie" and its commercial success "represents a triumph of publicity". "PETULIA is the come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-America-party" and the film is his (Lester's) "hate letter to America" (much the same I imagine as Antonioni's ZABRISKIE POINT was a year or two later). "Probably the director who made 3 celebrations of youth and freedom (A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, HELP!, THE KNACK) is now desperate to expand his range and become a "serious" director..." She does agree though that "Julie Christie is extraordinary to look at"  ....  For me though it is a great '60s American film like the recently-reviewed here THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, THE GROUP, THE STERILE CUCKOO, PRETTY POISON or LAST SUMMER and Coppola's delightful YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW.

BEDAZZLED, 1967 - more '60s high jinks and delirious comedy. Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore were possibly the finest comedians the UK has ever produced before Monty Python .... we loved their satirical tv shows (in black and white) then, Cook also had a (large) hand in the comic magazine "Private Eye" that was essential then too (I remember going to their offices to purchase a red enamel cofee pot, a trendy item to have then, and pinning the "Private Eye" covers on the kitchen wall). So it was marvellous to see them on the big screen in Cinemascope and Colour for 20th Century Fox and directed by Stanley Donen (on a roll then, after his '60s hits like CHARADE, ARABESQUE and TWO FOR THE ROAD - he came a cropper though with his next after this, the dreadful STAIRCASE... ). Not only is BEDAZZLED a brilliant modern version of Faust, but it's also a hilarious satire on the '60s. 

Dudley Moore plays Stanley Moon, a short order cook and a loser who works in a Wimpey Bar (before McDonalds came along). The fabulous Eleanor Bron plays Margaret Spencer, a waitress at the fast food restaurant where Stanley works. Stanley's spent six years trying to work up the courage to ask Margaret out, but just can't seem to manage to do so. Peter Cook plays the Devil, or George Spiggott. George has taken an interest in Stanley after his failed suicide attempt. George offers Stanley the standard Seven-Wishes-For- Your-Soul contact and Stanley reluctantly agrees. The problem with the wishes is that Stanley is never specific enough and something always goes wrong to prevent Stanley from having Margaret all to himself, as either an intellectual, then as a rock star, then as a wealthy industrialist etc. 

As each fails, he becomes more aware of how empty his life had been and how much more he has to live for. He also meets the seven deadly sins who try and advise him.We get Raquel Welch as Lust, and Barry Humphries as Envy. Bron is wonderful here (as she was in HELP! and in Donen's TWO FOR THE ROAD as that obnoxious American tourist) as the heavily made-up waitress intoning her hamburger orders "heavy on the onions". The London scene of the time is nicely depicted, even from the top of the GPO Post Office Tower, and the final segment with the leaping nuns will have you helpless with laughter ... Cook is a very petty devil, sending pigeons to drop their droppings on businessmen, scratching vinyl records and pulling the last page out of Agatha Christie novels, his magic words are "Julie Andrews" ! Dudley is great here, before his later less funny films. There was of course that remake, but I didn't bother with it, it just would not have the same funny memories for me. 

Soon: '60s thrillers like Lumet's downbeat THE DEADLY AFFAIR, Ken Russell's flashy BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN ...and some early '60s dramas: THE MARK, THE THIRD SECRET, THE INSPECTOR (LISA).

Two For The Road, 1967

A return visit to one of 1967's enchantments: Stanley Donen's TWO FOR THE ROAD, with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney making a great romantic team (off camera too it seems...), as they play out Frederick Raphael's witty script.

After Hepburn's '50s romances with those older men like Bogart, Fonda, Astaire she stepped into the new world of the swinging '60s for this trenchant comedy of marital manners. Ahead of its time in telling the story of her troubled marriage to architect Albert Finney in a non-linear fashion, the film embraces scenes from 12 years of road trips to the South of France. For once, Audrey got to play the bitter aftermath of youthful romance, as a woman who swears when angry and even cheats on her husband. In a big departure for the star, director Stanley Donen (working with Audrey again after FUNNY FACE and CHARADE) made her forego her usual couture wardobes by Givenchy in favor of the latest from such mod designers as Mary Quant and Paco Rabanne. The new look brought Hepburn into a more modern era and contributed to one of her best, and edgiest, performances, as we go back and forth through the years and in those different cars and time periods, right up to the mod swinging 1967 era, as captured by Schlesinger's DARLING and Antonioni's BLOW-UP.

Eleanor Bron and William Daniels are sterling support as the American friends they travel with one year, with their insufferable child, and young Jacqueline Bisset is there as well. It is still a witty charming treat as Raphael, who also scripted DARLING, reworks the fractured romance. Audrey had just done that other '60s treat, the delightful - if rarther overlong HOW TO STEAL A MILLION with that other English heart-throb of the era Peter O'Toole, set in Paris once again - at least half of Hepburn's movies have a French or Parisian setting, so this was of the same but more bittersweet. After this and WAIT UNTIL DARK Hepburn would be away from the screen until that lovely return in Lester's ROBIN AND MARIAN in 1976, when she enchanted us all over again ...

I could rhapsodise about Eleanor Bron at length here and in Donen's BEDAZZLED the next year in 1968 with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore - I love her deadpan Wimpy waitress with the eyeshadow, and of couse she was also ideal with The Beatles in HELP and in Ken Russell's WOMEN IN LOVE. I used to see her cycling around town frequently here in London, and she was once shopping next to me at Sainsbury's supermarket in Marylebone....more on BEDAZZLED in due course...

Lucy Schmeeler: "She's a grand girl"!

Let's end the year by picking up some sailors, going on the town and celebrating a great comic talent. Happy New Year !

Lucy Schmeeler (Alice Pearce) is the super-plain room-mate of Brunhilde Esterhazy (Betty Garrett) in the 1949 MGM musical ON THE TOWN, a perennial favourite I can enjoy anytime. I do not know Leonard Bernstein's original but it seems some of the songs were junked for the movie (but doesn't that always happen, as in FUNNY GIRL or CABARET?).

We enjoy following our 3 sailors on shore leave in late 40s New York, and the real locations help. Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munchin zoom around the city and the underground train system, Gabe (Gene) sees and falls for "Miss Turnstiles" (a monthly pin-up) whom he imagines is a celebrity, while she (Vera-Ellen at her loveliest) turns out to be from the same small town as his! Jules gets entangled with ritzy Ann Miller who has a thing about "Prehistoric men" and Jules' face fits just right, as they cause havoc at the museum and the dinosaur (or Dinah Shore!) collapses! Frank teams up with taxi driver Brunhilde - Betty Garrett who woos him back to "my place" - where Lucy Schmeeler ["she's a grand girl" says Betty with vitriolic sweetness...] is staying in with a cold. Betty finally gets to her leave so she can get close to Frank. They are supposed to be looking for the elusive Miss Turnstiles, but Gabe finds her at the rehearsal halls and they do that lovely dance to "Main Street" ....

Later they all team up at the top of the Empire State Building and head off "On The Town", this sequence is bliss as they visit one crowded nightclub after another where the revue girls always sing "thats all there is folks, and goodnight to you, we hope your enjoyed our .... revue" as the last girl always shoves her rear end in their faces... Miss Turnstiles has to flee though to her late night job as a coochie dancer at Coney Island, after Gabe gets stuck with Lucy Schmeeler who joins them for a riot of a number and some other sailors from the ship mistake her for Gabe's girl, so they will have a lot to tell the other guys back on the boat ... Gabe takes Lucy home and has to let her down gently as he is in love with Vera --- poor Lucy is back to her laundry lists and won't wash for a week after Gabe kisses her! Her plain character is being patronised of course but its part of the fun here.

Things work out ok at Coney Island and the 3 girls see off the 3 gobs back on their boat, as another flock of sailors disembark to explore "New York New York its a wonderful town"!. That's it in a nutshell, but it is so infectious and a sheer delight from start to finish [screenplay by Comden & Green] - a key musical then with Kelly and Stanley Donen co-directing, paving the way for all those 50s musicals ... including SINGING IN THE RAIN and IT'S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER (see post at musicals label) where their partnership broke up!

Alice Pearce's Lucy is a scream - Alice was a terrific comedienne, she was also Olga the "Jungle Red" manicurist spreading all the gossip in THE OPPOSITE SEX in 1956, [Dolores Gray label], that delicious musical remake of THE WOMEN, which I like so much. She was highly regarded also on tv, appearing in the BEWITCHED series, but she died aged only 48 in 1966. She also played Lucy Schmeeler in the original Broadway production of ON THE TOWN.

That iconic shot of Donen (below) with Kelly & Sinatra ...

"The Throb of Manhattan"

ITS ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER, 1955, may well be my very favourite musical (after A STAR IS BORN and THE BANDWAGON of course) - it and those sophisticated musicals from 1957 [LES GIRLS, FUNNY FACE, SILK STOCKINGS, THE PYJAMA GAME, bits of PAL JOEY] are my perennial favourites, ever since I saw them as a child at Sunday afternoon matinees - BRIGADOON was another but it it not quite in that league, but I prefer them to the over-hyped SINGING IN THE RAIN or AN AMERICAN IN PARIS both of which show Kelly at his most grating (of course, as per Musicals label, I also love ON THE TOWN, MY SISTER EILEEN, KISS ME KATE, SWINGTIME, GYPSY, LES DEMOISELLES DE ROCHEFORT among others...)

Good to see that ITS ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER is being revived by the London National Film Theatre in their season on MGM musicals - it cries out to be seen on widescreen, using as it does, multiple images when our 3 wartime buddies reflect on their lives now. It seems to have been a troubled shoot, co-directors Kelly and Stanley Donen fell out, Kelly and Charisse don't have any number together, she has one marvellous dance number "Baby You Knock Me Out" at the gym (where, as Pauline Kael put it, "Cyd Charisse is benumbed until she unhinges those legs") wearing that terrific Helen Rose ensemble, and Gene has the very inventive roller-skate number and of course when the 3 guys dance with the dustbin lids, so it is all very innovative, just as original musicals were dying, it was mainly films of Broadway shows after this.

It is the perfect mid-century story of 3 wartime buddies meeting up 10 years later in 1955 and realising that they don't like each other much now, and indeed Kelly and Dailey don't much like themselves either. Gene is mixing with hoods and managing a dumb boxer, while Dan Dailey has risen to "Executive Vice-President" level in advertising and is sick of the advertising game as he lets rip in his terrific solo number "Advertising-wise". Cyd Charisse is the television researcher who stumbles across the 3 wartime buddies and realises their reunion is ideal for her television show "Midnight with Madeline" for "The Throb of Manhattan" spot where saccharine stories are featured. This is the early days of live television and the movie is a splendid satire on those artificial tv hostesses like Madeline and her diva tantrums. Dolores Gray is stupendous here, and has one of the best numbers ever "Thanks a lot but no thanks" which is a delirious treat with that ritzy gown and that killer line:"I've got a man who's Clifton Webb and Marlon Brando combined"!. Then hood Jay C Flippen and his goons invade the studio where the live broadcast is being made, as they are after Gene who has thrown the fight once he realised his boxer has been bribed to lose it. Cyd gets the hoods to confess on live air, Madeline has a hit show, the 3 buddies realise they are still friends after all. It's a perfect conclusion as Cyd joins Gene and the the guys back at the bar where they vowed to meet up 10 years previously.



Choreographer Michael Kidd is ideal as the family man, Dailey has one of his best roles (apart from his father in THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS), Cyd and Gene sparkle as they spar with each other, and Dolores steals the show. What's not to love? It is a dark, sometimes bitter take on ON THE TOWN a decade later as the 3 buddies meet again - by 1955 though Sinatra had gone on to solo projects and was "difficult" and Jules Munchin was not a name enough. Produced of course by Arthur Freed, with songs by Andre Previn, script by Comden and Green; perfect entertainment then, but see the widescreen version, not panned and scanned! The DVD includes a fascinating 'Making-Of' chronicling the fallout between Kelly and Donen, and several out-takes including a terrific inventive (that word again) deleted number between Kelly and Charisse "Love is Nothing But a Racket" which has been unseen for far too long, and Michael Kidd's solo spot with some kids, but Gene did not want that included, after his number with kids in AN AMERICAN IN PARIS! Essential stuff then.

I met Gene at a recording of an interview of his for the BBC in 1975 - Donen of course went on to direct several of my enduing favourites: those Audrey Hepburn films like TWO FOR THE ROAD and CHARADE, Kendall in ONCE MORE WITH FEELING, Peck and Sophia ideal in ARABESQUE, and the marvellous BEDAZZLED with Pete and Dud and Eleanor Bron in 1967. We won't mention STAIRCASE or LUCKY LADY!

I love Paris in the springtime when it sizzles...

Having done London in the Movies (London label) our thoughts turn to Paris, particularly now that it is April, and influenced by GOODBYE AGAIN (below), here are some random Paris moments, by day and night. Rome, soon ....

There is Tony Perkins driving around Paris in 1961 in GOODBYE AGAIN; Jean Seberg driving in BONJOUR TRISTESSE in '58; Corrine Merchand in CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 (above), '61, waiting to hear her medical prognosis; Paul Newman, Joanne, Diahann Carroll again and Sidney in PARIS BLUES; Jeanne Moreau walking around Paris by night in LIFT TO THE SCAFFOLD; Charles Aznavour and Jacques Charrier driving around trying to pick up girls (like Anouk Aimee and Belinda Lee) in LES DRAGUEURS; young Jean-Pierre Leaud in THE 400 BLOWS, both '59; Sophia Loren doing the twist (it is 1962) with Perkins again in FIVE MILES TO MIDNIGHT, GIGI learning about love..., that all star cast in IS PARIS BURNING? 1966; Alain Delon's Jef Costello holed up in his hotel room in Melville's LE SAMOURAI, 1967; Charlotte Rampling in PARIS BY NIGHT, Tom Hanks at the Louvre in THE DE VINCI CODE, and of course the MOULIN ROUGE and any number of movies by Truffaut (LE PEAU DEUCE), Malle (LE FEU FOLLET, ZAZIE DANS LE METRO), Demy, Varda, Chabrol et al - Gerard Philipe and Anouk Aimee in their artists' garret in LES AMANTS DE MONTPARNASSE; Gina Lollobrigida and Anthony Quinn over at Notre Dame; Monica Vitti and Maurice Ronet dining at the Eiffel Tower in THE SCARLET LADY, '69; Romy Schneider, Capucine and O'Toole heading the madcap cast of WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT, '65 and of course Elizabeth looking stupendous in THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS, '54 ! Then we have Belmondo and Seberg in BREATHLESS, and (below) Brialy and Gerard Blain in Chabrol's LES COUSINS, '59, and of course Fred and Cyd in SILK STOCKINGS, and over there is that super apartment which LES GIRLS shared (Kay Kendall, Mitzi Gaynor and Taina Elg) mind you that might have been on the MGM backlot. For extensive looks at Paris in the early '60s the extras on Varda's CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 or Malle's ZAZIE are choice.

So yes there's hundreds of movies set in Paris... of course there is Hollwood Paris and the real gritty city of light, as diverse as AMELIE, GARE DU NORD, Tati's PLAYTIME, Godard's ALPHAVILLE, the cartoon GAY PURR-EE, thrillers like LA HAINE, RIFIFI, LE FLIC and Polanski's FRANTIC and THE TENANT, QUIET DAYS IN CLICHY, VICTOR/VICTORIA and of course Garbo in the mythical Paris of NINOTCHKA, and all those French noirs with Gabin, Delon, Moreau, Schneider, Signoret etc, oh and some movie with Gene Kelly...



No one though did Paris in the Movies like Audrey Hepburn - so many of her movies are set in or have visits to Paree: FUNNY FACE, her cookery school in SABRINA and she returns all elegant from her year in Paris, HOW TO STEAL A MILLION where she and O'Toole tootle around in that little car, BLOODLINE, LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON with Gary Cooper, in France at any rate in TWO FOR THE ROAD with Albie, PARIS WHEN IT SIZZLES and of course CHARADE with her fabulous Givenchy outfits for hiding on the Metro or visiting the flea-market, or dining on a bateau mouche down the Seine with Cary Grant ...
I must now play that Malcolm McLaren CD PARIS with the likes of Juliette Greco, Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Hardy vocalising, and some terrific Parisian rhythms. [I have been to Paris about 20 times over the years, its convenient from London now by Eurostar, and one of my best friends was married and living there for over a decade...]
PS: Chabrol's LES COUSINS from 1959, and his LES GODELUREAX from 1961 are new discoveries - more at Chabrol label.