Paris in Spring

Mary Ellis calls off her engagement to Tullio Carminati, so he goes up to the top of the Eiffel Tower to hurl himself off it. Meanwhile, Ida Lupino calls off her engagement to James Blakeley and she goes up to the top of the Eiffel Tower to do the same. There she meets Carminati, and decide to make their ex-lovers jealous. Down on the ground, Blakeley and Miss Ellis do likewise. But when Miss Lupino takes Carminati home, her deaf grandmother Jessie Ralph thinks they are married.

Lewis Milestone directs this bloodless sex farce competently, and there are some Harry Revel-Mack Gordon songs that are song operatically by Miss Ellis, with Carminati in duet in one. Miss Ellis had debuted with the Metropolitan Opera in 1918. She sang with Caruso in his last public appearance. Then she decided she wanted to conquer the legitimate stage, and signed with Belasco and then with Hammerstein. She decided to break her contract with Hammerstein, which barred her from singing on stage for a while, and appeared with her third husband, Basil Sidney, on Broadway in Shakespeare. Then it was over to England for Strange Interlude, Ivor Novello shows, and back to the US to star in a couple of pictures like this one. She did not impress, so it was back to England, and the stage, with occasional appearances through 1986. She died in 2003 at the age of 105.

Miss Ellis is quite lovely, and her voice is excellent, but the songs seem dropped into the movie and slow the pace. As usual, Miss Ralph steals the show.