'Paname' is a Parisian nickname for Paris and its suburbs. In 1927, Sisley Huddleston (a favourite writer of mine) published a novel called MR. PANAME, and in 1934 Francis Carco published a novel called PANAME. English-speakers tend not to be aware of what 'Paname' means in colloquial French, so now you know. In this film, that insouciant and lively rebel of the French cinema of the time, Suzy Delair, charms music hall audiences so much that she is spontaneously given the nickname 'Lady Paname' by an enthusiastic, roaring audience at the Olympia Theatre. The action of the film is set in 1925, and it is a vivid recreation of the time. The film is the first and only film directed by Henri Jeanson (1900-1970), who married Delair (this fact is not recorded in IMDb). He was well known as a journalist and editor of a satirical magazine, and he wrote 90 films, including Paris WHEN IT SIZZLES (1964) for William Holden and Audrey Hepburn, the script for Zola's NANA (1955), and most famously the great classic HOTEL DU NORD (1938). Jeanson does a wonderful job of directing, and it is a pity he never directed another one. The film is charming, in many ways hilarious, outrageous, and daring. It is extraordinarily 'suggestive' in the sexual sense, and the second song which Delair sings onstage has lyrics which are so bawdy and sexually explicit that no one dared translate them into English, so that the subtitles for it do not appear on screen. (Delair singing about her 'tits' and her bottom is the least of it.) Jeanson went to every extent possible to recreate the atmosphere of the Faubourg St. Martin (with the St. Martin arch in the background), and literally built an entire street complete with all its former shops, cafes and its cinema in perfect replica in the open air. It was so convincing that taxis drove through it frequently, believing it to be real. The Concordia Cinema is there, and the two famous cafes of the time, the small and rather dreary Café Aux Deux Chevrons where the more impoverished went to be sad, and the larger and grander Café Batifol, which Andre Breton described as patronised by the 'petits artistes de theatre et de concert'. And they do indeed form the characters for the story, all thronging there, quarrelling, disputing, offering and refusing jobs, discussing roles and songs, comparing notes and performances, in a froth of music hall social life which by the time this film was made had vanished entirely. For Parisian audiences of 1950, this film was their very own nostalgic AMELIE, but instead of a dreamy elfin Audrey Tautou, the heroine was the jaw-droppingly feisty actress and singer Suzy Delair, who has no modern equivalent. (She is apparently still alive aged 99, and I wonder if she has mellowed at all. Probably not. She last made a film at the age of 70, in 1987.) Visconti appreciated her talents and cast her in ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (1960). But her most famous performance was undoubtedly as Jenny Lamour in QUAI DES ORFEVRES (1947), directed by her earlier husband, Henri-Georges Clouzot, in which she appeared as a music hall artiste with Louis Jouvet, who also appears in LADY PANAME, the year before he died. This black and white film has been lovingly restored and issued on Blu-Ray with subtitles as a French classic. It is a must for those interested in the Paris of yesteryear, but it may well puzzle many non-French viewers, because the humour, the milieu, the relationships, the very special Paris type of gangsters known as apaches, and the raucous behaviour of the music hall set is so different from the way British and Americans have ever behaved, that to watch the film is to enter a world not only lost in time but far distant in manners from anything ever known amongst the 'Anglo-Saxons'.
