The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

So much average

Captivating movie !

best movie i've ever seen.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

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.

Reviewers either greatly admire or totally dismiss Van Johnson's presence and acting ability,never more so than in this movie.In one of his last interviews,he selected this as one of the works he was most proud of and I can understand why.As the story unwinds,over an eight year period,Van's performance takes us on a journey from a keen,love-smitten man through to a repentant,lonely one.His penultimate scene with Donna Reed really hits home,as we measure his helpless pleas against her stubborn bitterness.I'm genuinely moved each time I watch it,just as I am with the following moment when her husband (very nicely played by George Dolenz) awakens her to the sad truth.I don't want to give away any more than that.Donna Reed is very impressive in a role that's not easy to warm to. Elizabeth Taylor is at the height of her beauty and her performance is quite pleasing.As already mentioned,the only available DVD's of "The Last Time I Saw Paris" are of the poorest quality.With a re-mastered edition,I believe this entertaining movie could attract a whole new following.It's such a romantic title and that can't be denied.

Here's the thing. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940. He published his first novel in 1920 and his last in 1934. In the twenties and early thirties he turned out some fifty or so short stories for which, initially, he earned top dollar but when his wife, Zelda, was diagnosed as schizophrenic and hospitalized he turned to the bottle and apart from a series of pot-boilers about a Hollywood hack named Pat Hobby and a series of essays, The Crack-Up, published in Esquire magazine around 1936, he produced little of any merit, albeit he was working on a novel when he died. He owed his success, particularly where short stories were concerned, to his gift of both understanding and interpreting the 'voice' of young people in the 'Jazz' Age. Bablyon Revisited is one such story dating from his peak years so the minute MGM chose to 'update' it to some thirteen or fourteen years AFTER his death its uniqueness i.e. the 'voice' of the Jazz Age, was totally destroyed. Even the central sequence, a flashback that begins in 1945 can't do much to help as that was still five years after Fitzgerald died. That being said it is, of course quite possible that movie buffs who couldn't care less about Fitzgerald would have checked this out on the strength of Elizabeth Taylor - who had grown up at MGM - Van Johnson, who had starred in several big-budget MGM movies in the forties and Walter Pigeon, who had likewise appeared in some top grossing MGM fodder (and had, ironically, just appeared in The Bad And The Beautiful, also from MGM which lifted a few rocks in the tide-pool that is Hollywood to reveal the unsavory marine life scrabbling around there). These people may well have come away content and serenely oblivious to Fitzgerald's ending, diametrically opposed to the one on offer here. The bad news is that even as I write the semi-amateur Baz Luhrman has got his claws into The Great Gatsby and is no doubt even now attempting to outdo the joke he entitled Moulin Rouge.

What is the use of speaking of a romantic drama when there is hardly any romance and the drama is not detectable in the script but in the character of the ever worst casted actor in a romantic role: i.e. Van Johnson. Enjoy the repeating entree of Elisabeth Taylor. She suffers from playing in a worn-out movie (Richard Brooks, eat your hat) and has to deal with an actor who is depressed all along with an up-tight hair-do. Hopefully this movie is the last of its kind. Scene after scene put in front of a camera without any expressions of feeling. You never will be dragged into it. Within a few years (after release) the french cinema (Truffaut, Malle etc) will lead the way to a new kind of filmmaking. And in that wake Brooks resurrected as director and writer with movies like Key Largo, Elmer Gantry etc. Luckely Scott Fitzgerald did not live long enough to see "his" film.