British troops returning from fighting in WW1 hardly spoke of their experiences when they returned to the UK. They knew that the horrors were too much to tell mothers, wives, sisters and daughters who had led sheltered lives.
But there was another category of experiences which in contrast were very fondly remembered but were also covered by a veil of silence albeit for very different reasons. American troops post 1917, just like their British counterparts, would not have got to know much of French private domestic lives, but a great deal about the streets, the bars - and the women who frequented either or both. By 1930 when this film was made, unlike today, there would, one guesses, have been perhaps 100,000+ former soldiers with a very expert eye indeed for authenticity, even more than a tourist they had been there,seen this and done that, of French WW1 street life and the characters, men and women, to be seen. Of travelling street entertainers. Of the brassy bar singer with her sometimes sweet, sometimes fierce manner and language. Memories too of unsullied sweetness and innocence. Albeit made charming and rather sanitised.
And who, other than these ex-soldiers - and their families ("You were in France, Dear, weren't you? Was it like this?") would this lovely film have been made for? Most of the cast are French - and more French is spoken than I think any other American film before or since. It also has a French lightness, sentimentality, charm and humour - I completely mistook it for a French film, and the heart-breakingly sweet Anita Louise as being French. For soldiers who had fought in France then returned home, the film could hardly have been a more charming, delightful and evocative reminder of pleasing memories - some perhaps just like Heaven - which thereafter they had had to keep to themselves.
That generation has of course gone and it is now for a generation with no experience of this very distant place and time to be judges of its authenticity. As to its French credentials, the screen writer had written the silent movie "L'Apache" in 1919 (Maurice Chevalier had made the song "I'm an Apache" internationally famous in Ruben Mamoulian's 1932 "Love me Tonight"). Tiffany it seems were just a very busy journeyman studio (I see that "One Punch Kelly" followed in 1931). They did however do a fine job on Just Like Heaven.
Seen on Talking Pictures TV Freeview and Freesat in UK
