Good Girls Go to Paris (Alexander Hall, 1939) was the second of three movies pairing two of classic Hollywood's best light comedians: Melvyn Douglas and Joan Blondell. Though all three films were made at Columbia, the stars seemed to epitomise their more regular employers. Douglas was suave, elegant, sometimes stuffy, like America's biggest studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Blondell played down-to-earth, a touch raunchy but essentially good-natured - Warner Bros' censor-baiting product in a nutshell. In Douglas and Blondell's other vehicles - There's Always a Woman and The Amazing Mr Williams - he was a detective, while she played his wife. Good Girls Go to Paris offers something a little different. Joan is a waitress with a masterplan: she's going to date a rich boy, secure a marriage proposal, then blackmail his parents and skip to Paris with the funds. As you might expect, there's a catch: the "flutter" in her stomach, a pang of conscience that flares up at just the wrong time. It doesn't help that she's secretly in love with college professor Douglas. That set-up is a springboard for genre fun, but the writers aren't happy with just one surefire premise, so they throw in another. In common with numerous films of the period (Merrily, We Live, My Man Godfrey for starters) our hero(ine) ends up being adopted by a wacky upper-class family - whom she teaches a life lesson or two.
The script isn't always as sharp as you'd like, with some one-dimensional characters - Joan Perry's Sylvia isn't very well-realised compared to Gail Patrick's similar character in My Man Godfrey - and an inability to maximise the situations it creates, but the leads are very bright, with an effortless chemistry. And it's great to see divisive blowhard Walter Connolly shouting his head off. One curious aspect of the film was making Douglas' professor English. He doesn't make much of a stab at the accent and his nationality is the basis for nothing save a throwaway joke. Most odd.
Trivia note: Douglas tired of films shortly afterwards, saying he had played too many identikit roles in romantic comedies, and after 1943 made only irregular screen performances, devoting himself increasingly to the stage - though also to TV. He made a triumphant return to films in the early 1960s, and won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Hud in 1963. He repeated the success with 1978's Being There.
The script isn't always as sharp as you'd like, with some one-dimensional characters - Joan Perry's Sylvia isn't very well-realised compared to Gail Patrick's similar character in My Man Godfrey - and an inability to maximise the situations it creates, but the leads are very bright, with an effortless chemistry. And it's great to see divisive blowhard Walter Connolly shouting his head off. One curious aspect of the film was making Douglas' professor English. He doesn't make much of a stab at the accent and his nationality is the basis for nothing save a throwaway joke. Most odd.
Trivia note: Douglas tired of films shortly afterwards, saying he had played too many identikit roles in romantic comedies, and after 1943 made only irregular screen performances, devoting himself increasingly to the stage - though also to TV. He made a triumphant return to films in the early 1960s, and won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Hud in 1963. He repeated the success with 1978's Being There.