American Cinema: The Last time I Saw Paris (1954)

(contains spoilers)  I don't know what it is with me, but I hate films where the main characters are doing something or saying something stupid, which seemed to happen a lot in this film.  It made me want to turn it off, and with a certainty I expect this is that last time I'm going to see "The Last Time I Saw Paris."

 In this film, America's boy next door, Charles Wills (Van Johnson) is in Paris soon after its liberation in 1945 and meets and falls in love and marries Helen Ellswirth (Elizabeth Taylor).  She is a fragile and flighty minor heiress living in Paris with her wealthy father. In time they have a child. 

Johnson and Taylor

He is there trying to write the "great American Novel" and gradually discovering that he sucks at being a writer and that he drinks too much.  He engages in a minor infidelity with the glamorous blonde Eva Gabor while Helen goes off in pursuit of a very young Roger Moore.  Nevertheless it is clear they love their little girl and love each other, sort of.    Meanwhile while the VHS tape I was watching was track-able, the color would go off occasionally at the critical moment in the dialogue and Van's or Elizabeth's face would turn green. Somehow this seemed appropriate considering the dialogue.  Somehow things go from bad to worse when an oil well that was the wedding gift of his father in law strikes oil. 

Taylor and Moore

He quits his job and goes on as before partying harder and racing his sports car with Eva Gabor's character as passenger with a reckless disregard for safety, his or others.  In one sequence he is driving at top speed through a curvy course and ends up in a ditch when some local yokel herds his cattle across the road. 

Then on that inevitable night when he gets a bit too drunk and too bitter he and his wife have a fight in the midst of a party and he goes off in the night into the rain on a toot.  He ends up in drunken unconsciousness on the stairway of his own house while his wife who arrives later in the rain is pounding on the door and asking to be forgiven.  He of course is unavailable for such duty since he was at the time unconscious on the staircase.  She goes off disconsolate and cold and wet to her sister and her husband, who hate him, and considering his behavior why not?    Things get rapidly worse from there and she catches pneumonia and ends up in a Paris hospital. 

Helen, wet and dying

This leads to the single most unbelievable moment of the film.  It didn't seem that bad a case of pneumonia to begin with and it took a while for it to dawn on me that she was actually dying.  Charles and Helen tearfully make amends while she asks him to take good care of their little daughter, now maybe 8 years old.  A bit more of this and she is silent.  I thought maybe she had just drifted off to sleep or something, but no.  The nurse comes in and scolds him for sitting there so long with his apparently now-dead wife and pulls the sheet over her face.  It was only then that I realized that Helen had died. Why was the nurse so brusque?  Well it is supposed to be France and her shift must have been coming to an end. 

This might have been the end of the film, I was kind of expecting it to be, but it wasn't.  He now had to deal with the fact that Helen's sister had taken custody of the child and had him declared an unfit parent.  He leaves and goes back to America and then after an interval comes back.  He wants his little girl.  And so the last few scenes get played out.  He is once more apologising for being such a drunken ass for so long to Helen's sister, and after things hang in the balance for a while, well you can guess the rest.  

F. Scott Fitzgerald

This film was loosely based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "Babylon Revisited".  How loosely I don't know.  All I know is that Fitzgerald, by the time this film was made, had been dead for a dozen years or more  and presumably could not object.