When Charlie, a WWII veteran, comes back to Paris he is
flooded with memories of the last time he was there. He remembers the
excitement, glamour, and romance of post-war Paris when he met his one true
love, had years of happy and glamorous marriage, and he remembers the strain of
being a struggling and frequently rejected writer, how he and his wife grew up
and apart, and how his marriage ended.
Based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story Babylon Revisited, The Last Time I Saw Paris proves to be a movie that is best kept
within its decade of release. Unfortunately it’s just one of those ‘classics’
that don’t make the shelf in the world of modern audiences and becomes the
victim of staleness and dust-bunnies. I found this movie to be quite boring,
even during its most romantic or dramatic scenes, and that’s sad for me to say
because I really love Elizabeth Taylor and Donna Reed won my affection after
her performance in It’s a Wonderful Life.
When Charlie, a WWII veteran, comes back to Paris he is flooded with memories
of the last time he was there. He remembers the excitement, glamour, and
romance of post-war Paris when he met his one true love, had years of happy and
glamorous marriage, and he remembers the strain of being a struggling and
frequently rejected writer, how he and his wife grew up and apart, and how his
marriage ended.
I’m not trying to say that this movie is a bad movie. But I’m
not saying that it’s a good movie either. For me, this is a piece of cinema
that’s just there in existence for no other reason that it was maybe a good
story on the page and had the potential to come alive on screen. Sadly this was
not the case. As Sir Anthony Hopkins said in Hitchcock, “it’s stillborn.”
The main concern is that there is a strong
romantic element to this story; it really does have the potential to spark some
emotion, but the casting just didn’t help at all in that department. I found
that there was little to no chemistry between all the actors and therefore
everything: lines, gestures, whatever just felt all lifeless. For me, it was an
example of simply playing by the script, doing what was on the page and not
really interpreting what the character was actually saying or feeling. This, I
think, is one of the most awful things that can happen in cinema because one of
the thrills of going to the movies is being able to take a peek into worlds
that are not our own and being able to see and really feel how the inhabitants
function in that world. If I wasn’t so strict on myself to watch an entire
movie and then let you all in on what’s good and bad about it, I would have
turned this film off and moved onto something else.
Cinematically, the film is
fine. It moves along at a fine pace, it’s put together quite well so there’s a
nice flow that continues the entire way through, and there’s a nice level of
closure at the end although I still think that it’s one of the cheapest and
most lacklustre endings I’ve seen.
Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Van Johnson,
Donna Reed, Walter Pidgeon, Kurt Kasznar, George Dolenz, Eva Gabor, and Roger
Moore, The Last Time I Saw Paris is a
fine film cinematically, but not one that I would recommend. Filled with
romance, glamour, parties, and drama, there just was no real life in it and
without being able to relate to, root for, or even hate the characters, why
should audiences watch it?
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