To Paris with Love

While this gentle romantic film To Paris With Love (1955) is admittedly no masterpiece it does provide you with a nice cast, irreplaceable views of post-War Paris in 1955, including the grand old cars, stylish fashions men and women wore back then, the kind of music they listened to, how clean everything looked and how polite people were with one another in that era. All in Technicolor (it says Technicolor on the print itself right on the title frame, not Eastman Color as someone else stated, which is different and tends to diffuse more with time).

Alec Guinness is sweet in the film as he visits Paris with his 20 year old son (Vernon) in the hopes of finding a nice French girl for him. Little does he know that his son also hopes to find a nice older French woman for him. What occurs instead is that the son falls for an older woman and the father falls for a younger woman! I thought that both situations were understandable -- both women were attractive -- but still one senses early on they will merely end up being temporary flirtations and not the real thing.

If you are a romantic person you will probably enjoy the film. If you're not you're probably better off watching something else more realistic. I liked it. To each their own.

"To Paris with Love" starts off with a good premise for a romantic comedy: a middle-aged widower and his 20-year-old son both decide to play matchmaker for each other, but each one soon finds himself falling for the woman he'd picked out for the other. Unfortunately, the potential of this idea is never realized. The story and direction are bland, and there's no perceptible chemistry between the couples in any of their permutations. The charm of Alec Guinness provides some appealing moments (particularly in one sequence where he attempts to impress his young lady friend by retrieving a lost shuttlecock), but too often, the script is just too flat for even Guinness to liven up.

Ealing Studio's output deteriorated noticeably when in the 1950s they increasingly worked in colour. Similarly the modesty that characterised Hamer's films at Ealing is here notable for its absence; especially as Alec Guinness isn't exactly obvious casting as a romantic lead.

Which accounts for why this rather trivial romantic comedy - despite the use of Parisian locations - provides further evidence that during the fifties a director was likely to make his least interesting work in colour.

Alec Guinness starred in an impressive number of very good comedies in the 1950s, and most of these are now sadly quite obscure. The obscurity of Robert Hamer's 'To Paris with Love' *isn't* such a tragedy, however. There are one or two genuinely funny lines in this film, but the laughs are far too infrequent to justify watching it, even in light of its rather forgiving 78 minute runtime. The performances are not too bad and Guinness's is predictably solid, but when the film's problems are situated in the writing and directing even a legion of A-listers would probably fail to elevate it out of mediocrity. To the fans of 'Kind Hearts and Coronets' who've found their way to this later pairing of Hamer and Guinness: don't get your hopes up.

In a recent biography of Alec Guinness I couldn't find too much about To Paris With Love. I'm sure Guinness did the film to get a free trip to Paris out of it. The film has no other reason for existence.

Paris of course is nicely photographed with that wonderful opening of Guinness and his son driving down the Champs Elysee with the Arc De Triomphe in the background. Unfortunately it goes downhill from there.

There is just no chemistry at all between Guinness and the young girl who he has a brief fling with in Paris. According to the recent biography of Guinness by Piers Paul Read, Guinness positively disliked the girl, found her conduct unprofessional. As to what Odile Vernois thought of her co-star, no record is available. They have as much chemistry as two neutered cats.

Guinness does have a good moment in the film which was straight from one of his Ealing comedies as he climbs a tree trying to retrieve a badminton shuttlecock. But I wouldn't wait through the film for it.

At least Alec got a trip to Paris out of the deal.