The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)
In newly liberated Paris an American newspaperman marries a spirited heiress, and a sudden Texas oil windfall lets them live extravagantly. His drinking and stalled novel, her jealousy and a flirtation of her own, pull the marriage apart, and after her death he returns years later to win back custody of their daughter.
Adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “Babylon Revisited,” The Last Time I Saw Paris was one of the first films to build a picture around Elizabeth Taylor as an adult star. A defective copyright notice on the prints gave the year as MCMXLIV instead of MCMLIV, starting the term a decade early, so MGM’s renewal came too late and the film entered the public domain in 1972.
Background
The Last Time I Saw Paris was directed by Richard Brooks and adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story ‘Babylon Revisited,’ which sets its domestic drama in postwar Paris. Elizabeth Taylor stars as a spirited heiress who marries an American newspaperman played by Van Johnson, and Walter Pidgeon and Donna Reed are in the cast. MGM produced the film in 1954. A defect in its copyright notice reportedly left the picture in the public domain in the United States, which is one reason it circulates so widely on archival platforms.
What to watch for
Watch the opening stretch in liberated Paris, where the couple’s giddy spending follows a sudden windfall from Texas oil. The later sections, in which his drinking and stalled writing and her jealousy pull the marriage apart, carry most of the drama, and they give Taylor a range of emotional scenes that was unusual for a star of her age at the time. The film is built on Fitzgerald’s melancholy themes, and its movement from prosperity to ruin gives the picture its structure. At 116 minutes it is long, and its pacing rewards patience with the marriage’s slow collapse.
