Audrey in Paris
Director Ernst Lubitsch’s snide “I’ve been to Paris France and I’ve been to Paris Paramount. Paris Paramount is better,” has an element of truth in it, movie truth. The Paris streets on Hollywood back lots recreated a Paris either long gone, or that were inaccessible by cost, technical, or political obstructions. Probably my first film about Paris was the 1939 RKO version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Victor Hugo story that has been filmed at least a half dozen times by Hollywood beginning with Universal’s 1923 version featuring Lon Chaney contorting himself into Quasimodo.* They could make a half-dozen more but I would still think of Quasimodo as Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara as Esmeralda, and Notre Dame as a fairly convincing movie set in LA.
Many moviegoers don’t remember the Paris scenes in Casablanca (1942, WB)**, not because those scenes were shot on “French Street” at the Warner Bros lot in Burbank, but because they must have been more convinced of the authenticity of the Moroccan scenes, which were also shot in LA sun. The war was, of course, an obstacle to shooting (film) in both locations. In that iconic “goodbye” scene when Rick (Bogart) tells Ilse (Bergman) she has to leave on the plane:
Ilsa asks: But what about us?
Rick: We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have, we, we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.
Ilsa: When I said I would never leave you.
Rick: And you never will. . . .
There sets in the notion that there is something indelible, existentially-affirming about almost any experience that takes place in Paris, but especially the romantic encounter in which the city plays both Cupid and indifferent presence at love’s evanescence. The movies that sometimes have the most profound and indelible effects upon us often owe more to the impressionable ages of our imaginations and dreams than to the renown or quality of the film. The post-war years were perhaps my most formative in this regard and I still wonder about the major historical event that played out when I was just a young man. I was entering my teens when 1954 MGM’s re-working of an F. Scot Fitzgerald story to a setting in the days immediately following liberation of Paris from the Nazis. These days more people might remember The Last Time I Saw Paris*** is the popular title song rather than the overly sentimental tragic romance of two expat Americans played by Van Johnson as an Army journalist for Stars and Stripes and Liz Taylor as rich, beautiful daddy’s girl. It was a heady time, halcyon days, some might say, when Parisians still loved Yanks for a while and the old cafés that Hemingway and Fitzgerald used to hang at were again available for the next generation of aspiring ex-pat writers. They meet and fall in love in the fever of celebration that greeted the American liberators with flowers, wine and freely given kisses from Parisiennes. But sublime moments, like the joy of liberation, must soon give way to the day-to-day realities of life. The movie is a flashback to when, as the lyric says “hearts were young and gay,” but plays out to the tragedies of talent unequal to ambition, alcohol, sibling discord and marital dissolution.
Despite its rather melodramatic cinematic rendering of Fitzgerald’s story The Last Time I Saw Paris confirms that our memories of that (or any) city are composed of the individually unique Paris that is at the existential intersection of our time in that place. When Casablanca’s Rick and Ilsa can only hold on to one another in the shared memory of their time in Paris during the Nazi occupation we become mnemonically-triggered to our own memories. (Often what makes a movie “memorable” is that it forms a connection with our personal memories.) Our memories of urban périodes au delà are often laced with lament and regret, not only for youth and passion past, but also for Paris sans Tour Montparnasse and La Defense and the desecration of access to the Seine by the voie expresse. We expect, and hope, that the “next time I [we] see Paris” it will be the Paris of our memories. It never is, because it cannot be. Paris has “moved on”; and so have we. Only the movie remains fixed in time.****
My next Hollywood-Paris movies influences came a few years later with what might be called the “Paris romance-caper movies”: Funny Face (Paramount 1957), Love in the Afternoon (Allied Artists, 1957), Charade (Universal 1963), Paris When it Sizzles (1964 Quine Productions), andHow to Steal a Million (1966 Worldwide).***** By then, when the French nouvelle vague were intent on their own culture, in Hollywood’s terms at least, Paris had returned to a place of cultural adventure for Americans, not of nostalgia for time past, but of fun and romance in the present, where even crime and comedy could romp in streets that no longer evoked the beat ofwehrmacht jackboots. Paris had its previous waves of popularity with Lost Generation and the Moveable Feasts of Stein and Hemmingway. By the late 1950s tourism was back and the ex-pat Americans were not only some leftover GIs like Charles Wills (Van Johnson) trying to make it as novelists.
But since it would be a few more years before I could travel to the real Paris there was always the Americanized version of Paris composed of Gershwin, Mancini, Lerner, and Astaire’s (or Kelly’s American in Paris) choreography, with the odd French actor (Chevalier, Jourdan, as in Gigi) thrown in for flavor. It was Hollywood’s Americanizing of Paris the same way Americans created spaghetti with meatballs and chow mein out of Italian and Chinese cuisine. This was “Gay Paree,” Coco and Givenchy Paree, Technicolor Paree. But it was a Paree that appealed to my romantic sensibilities. After all, I had yet to visualize contemporary Paris through anything other that the apertures framed by Stanley Donnen, William Wyler, Richard Quine and Billy Wilder, among others. So when I finally arrived Paris came with me, as it does so many others, “second-handed,” filtered through the imagination and artistry of others. It is upon the romantic associations****** that they create that we form our “pre” Paris and, not until we first step outside La Gare du Nord for the first time, that the Paris of everyday life, of political graffiti, dog-fouled footpaths and disappointing contemporary construction remind us that we might fall in love with cities but we shouldn’t expect them to love us in return.
Except of course, in the movies. Movies will continue to be made in, and about, Paris—some eight-hundred and counting already by a recent assessment—and it is perhaps a signature of a great city that it can inspire and facilitate a return to fantasy such as Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), not only a veritable travelogue of actual Paris locations, including Notre Dame, but that, in torchlight, gaslight and candlelight (it is, after all, “the City of Light”) is a caprice of cinematic archeology.
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© 2013, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 1.13.2014)