The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

Film: The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

Stars: Elizabeth Taylor, Van Johnson, Walter Pidgeon, Donna Reed, Eva Gabor, Roger Moore

Director: Richard Brooks

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Donna Reed: click here to learn more about Ms. Reed (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are going to conclude our month-long look at the career of Donna Reed with the twilight of her film career.  Reed would stop making theatrical movies by the mid-1950's, when she was essentially shooting bargain basement flicks for Columbia, and one could argue that today's movie The Last Time I Saw Paris was the last really high-budget movie she'd make, though the budget has less to do with her coming off of an Oscar win and more because she was starring opposite one of the biggest emerging stars of the era, Elizabeth Taylor.  Given that motion pictures were doing nothing for her, she decided to move to television, where her long history of big-screen projects and her Oscar win were enough to get her an eponymous TV series called The Donna Reed Show which would run for eight years on ABC.  Initially a flop (Reed was up against Milton Berle & the show was nearly cancelled in its first season), moving the series to Thursday nights earned the show a following, but it also accrued quite a bit of infamy.  We're going to talk about what happened to Reed's show, both during & after its run, in a second, but first I want to make sure we pay attention to the movie at-hand today, The Last Time I Saw Paris.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is told in retrospect, and it's got a lot of plot (based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald it also has a lot of booze & tragedy).  Essentially the gist of the movie is that we have Charles Willis (Johnson), a war correspondent who is accosted by a woman on the street that we learn is Helen (Taylor), a carefree younger sister of a woman who has also made Charles' acquaintance Marion (Reed).  Both sisters are obviously in love with Charles, but it's Helen that he prefers, her carefree spirit & more conventional attractiveness making her impossible to deny.  Charles & Marion are a terrible pairing, with the former an unsuccessful writer who is practical, the latter a free spirit who indulges in spending money she doesn't have.  Their lives are torn asunder when the barren oil fields that Charles got as a dowry from his equally cavalier father-in-law (Pidgeon) actually strike oil, making them momentarily rich.  The couple start to grow apart, with them both starting up affairs (with a young Eva Gabor & Roger Moore), hurting their relationship, and leading Charles to become an alcoholic.  One night, Helen tries to return in the rain to their house, but Charles, drunk, cannot get to the door, and so Helen goes to Marion's in the cold...and promptly dies from pneumonia.  Charles cannot forgive himself, and neither can Marion, who holds a grudge for him not choosing her initially, and for a while she keeps his daughter with Helen from her, but in the end they are reunited, trying to live their lives in the wake of Helen's death.

The movie should work but it doesn't.  There's a compelling story, and Taylor is fire here (she looks great).  But the story doesn't really know what to do with the main characters, who don't really have much chemistry with each other or with Gabor/Moore.  Honestly, I always struggle with Van Johnson when he's doing drama...my favorite role for him is the curmudgeon in Brigadoon, but I've never loved him in anything else.  Honestly, Donna Reed is really good here in a role that is vastly underwritten-her late-breaking adoration of Charles is only etched in her eyes, not in the script, and I spent most of the movie wanting to see things from her perspective.  After a month of Reed getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop, at least here she earns the star power she wasn't given in other movies we've profiled.

Reed, as I mentioned, moved to television after this.  The Donna Reed Show was the first major broadcast show in the United States to feature a mother as the most important character in a family sitcom, rather than the father or the children.  The show launched the singing careers of Shelley Fabares ("Johnny Angel") & Paul Petersen ("My Dad"), who played Reed's children.  The show, though, attracted criticism of feminists, who thought the show depicted Reed's character Donna Stone as a submissive housewife who wore ballgowns while washing windows; this would be mocked decades later in a Gilmore Girls episode where Rory would dress as Donna Reed on a date with her boyfriend Dean.  Reed did not take well to her character being criticized by the women's liberation movement of the 1970's, and engaged in public statements against women in film & TV of the era that we would now consider to be "slut shaming" referring to them as "kooky, amoral, & sick."  

Reed's politics were more complicated, though, than you'd think.  While she was a longtime Republican, which leans into much of what we associate with her today as being synonymous with her fictional Donna Stone character, I was surprised to find out in researching her this month that she went from endorsing Barry Goldwater in 1964 to supporting Eugene McCarthy in 1968, a shift driven entirely by her views on Vietnam, which she vehemently opposed.  Reed would rarely work after The Donna Reed Show (though she attempted a comeback in Dallas to replace Barbara bel Geddes that would ultimately result in Reed successfully suing CBS for breach-of-contract when bel Geddes changed her mind and returned to the show).  She died in 1986 at the age of 64 of pancreatic cancer.  Next month, for our last month focused on "Film-to-TV," we are going to talk about an actress who, unlike the eleven figures we profiled before this, was one of the biggest stars of the Classical Hollywood era, not needing to indulge in television as a way to cement her celebrity.  That she did anyway in the 1960's indicated just how important television had become, permanently linked to the Hollywood machinery.

OVP: Mrs. Parkington (1944)

Film: Mrs. Parkington (1944)

Stars: Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Edward Arnold, Agnes Moorehead, Cecil Kellaway, Gladys Cooper

Director: Tay Garnett

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Greer Garson, Supporting Actress-Agnes Moorehead)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

We conclude our week devoted to Best Supporting Actress with one of the category's most beloved figures.  Few actors have made a bigger name for themselves in this category than Agnes Moorehead, who throughout the years received four Academy Award nominations (and four losses, never getting a trophy despite some close calls, particularly 1964's Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte).  Moorehead is best-known for her work today on TV's Bewitched, but she was a presence in movies for decades, a key part of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre (she played Charles Foster Kane's mother), and was the first woman to host the Academy Awards.  Today we go to possibly her least known nomination (and for me, the final one I hadn't seen), with her starring opposite one of Classic Hollywood's most beloved pairs, Greer Garson & Walter Pidgeon, in Mrs. Parkington.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is told in large part through flashback, with Susie Parkington (Garson, both young & old) a wealth society dame, remembering her relationship with Major Parkington (Pidgeon), all while her relatives are visiting her, assuming she's near death's door & will soon be bequeathing their inheritance upon her.  As we see, Susie didn't have an easy life, starting her time in a boarding house and then meeting Major Parkington, a cutthroat businessman who cares little for the lives of his employees until his carelessness leads to Susie's mother's death, and he takes her under his wing, with the help of Baroness Aspasia Conti (Moorehead), his former lover who still has feelings for him.  The two have a troubled-but-happy marriage, oftentimes with Parkington's blunt demeanor & carelessness getting in the way of their happiness (even resulting in Susie having a miscarriage), but it's one that is built on love (eventually) and not money, and when Susie sees that money has corrupted her heirs, she tells them that she will disinherit them, giving the money to those her grandson-in-law has ripped off through a criminal enterprise, and will return to the modest beginnings she once had before she met Major Parkington.

Mrs. Parkington is, as you can tell from that star rating, kind of a catastrophe.  It's so boring, and I actually genuinely like Greer Garson (I know that this is a reaction a lot of people associate with the actress, who played similar roles across her heyday), but this movie is dense, and Pidgeon is at his charmless worst here.  The movie is preachy, frequently only valuing "the morals of the masses" and assuming that money is a completely corrupting force (it's preaching to the choir for the audience, but it's a little bit of an eyebrow raise to modern audiences watching these wealthy actors try to cater for profits in such a way).  It's also predictable, and most of the performances are wooden.

This is true for Garson (though worse for the non-nominated Pidgeon).  She doesn't bring much at all to Mrs. Parkington, and surely was a default nomination for one of the Academy's favorite actresses; her Susie is bland & without personality.  This isn't the case for Moorehead, the saving grace of the film.  Her Baroness steals every scene she's in, and while she's also tasked with a burdensome chore of a role (we know from the opening that these two women will be friends, but also that they're desperately in love with the same man but by sheer will of star billing Garson is going to get him), it's the one reason to see this film.  She's been better (her magnum opus two years earlier in The Magnificent Ambersons remains her career capper), but what a welcome relief in this unbearable movie.

OVP: Million Dollar Mermaid (1952)

Film: Million Dollar Mermaid
Stars: Esther Williams, Victor Mature, Walter Pidgeon, David Brian, Jesse White, (and a cameo by prima ballerina Maria Tallchief)
Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Esther Williams-click here to learn more about Ms. Williams (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Esther Williams would continue on past 1952 in the movies, and might be the first actress in this series whose career ended up having too many chapters for us to investigate them properly in just one month.  MGM kept putting her in movies until the mid-50's, even though her aquacade musicals were no longer the guaranteed blockbusters they were in the 1940's, until she refused to take the June Allyson role in The Opposite Sex, and as a result she left the studio.  Williams would go on to make a few more films after 1956, though her husband Lorenzo Lamas preferred she stay home and be a homemaker.  Though she'd flirt with returning to movie stardom (she was wanted for the Shelley Winters role in The Poseidon Adventure, a role that won Winters an Oscar nomination, a distinction that Williams never achieved), she'd have a more successful second act to her career as a businesswoman, selling swimwear & swimming pools, and even served as a commentator as the 1984 Olympics.  As you can tell, there's more to talk about with Esther Williams, but we're going to end our monthlong look at her with what would become her most iconic role, and one that she had wanted to do in Hollywood since the moment she signed with MGM: Annette Kellerman, famed swimmer & actress, in Million Dollar Mermaid.

(Spoilers Ahead) For those unfamiliar, Annette Kellerman (Williams) was a star of the Hippodrome in the early-1910's, having come over from Australia.  In the film, we see her start as a young girl who has weak legs, but uses swimming to strengthen them and in the process becomes a champion swimmer.  However, she and her father (Pidgeon) fall on hard times, and have to sell her trophies just to make rent.  Kellerman meets Jimmy Sullivan (Mature) and his assistant Doc (White), who are relatively successful grifters who have a kangaroo-boxing act, but think that Kellerman could be a major attraction.  They first have her swim 26-miles through the Thames river, and then in Boston they have her wear a one-piece bathing suit to great scandal (and in the process, huge publicity).  Eventually Kellerman becomes a superstar, sharing the stage with prima ballerina Anna Pavlova (played in the film by the first American prima ballerina Maria Tallchief, who is mesmerizing in a grandiose performance as "the dying swan").  However, she longs for Jimmy, who left her when she joined the Hippodrome, and is participating in a series of crazy stunts.  After a freak accident with a giant glass tank (while she was filming a movie), Kellerman is hospitalized, though those that love her predict she'll walk again (real-life spoiler alert since it's not in the movie-she did, and had a very long life), and reunites with Jimmy, a happy ending on the film.

The movie is, well, glossy is about the best adjective I could come up with.  The film is billed as a musical, but it's really more a biopic with a few musical sequences, and unlike some of the sprier investments we had from Williams this month, it tends to drag.  Mature & Williams were having an on-set affair at the time (if you believe her memoirs, which are famously juicy but likely a bit exaggerated), but that charisma isn't really there onscreen.  Esther does her best here, but Mature is such an indulgent actor that he doesn't pair with the subtle Williams, and the supporting cast isn't game enough (or given enough to do) to really warrant much credit.

But it's the musical numbers that are the reason to see this film.  Williams does a gorgeous underwater ballet with a clam shell and a gigantic & fantastic number where she's in a long one-piece metallic gold swimsuit among a cascade of streaming water jets where she does a mesmerizing high-dive.  Best of all is this number with Williams surrounded by pillars of red & yellow smoke and a couple of dozen synchronized swimmers literally diving from swings into a pool, with Williams hanging on for dear life on a ring suspended above them in a circle.  Williams was injured badly in one of these stunts (in the books/articles I read prepping for this month's star, it's hard to tell which of the three numbers it was in), but you can see why this is the film that was synonymous with her legend-these rank among the most impressive sequences that MGM ever put into a musical (and that's saying a lot).  The film's sole nomination for Best Cinematography is no accident-shooting these difficult stunts in such glorious Technicolor must have been a challenge.  As a result, I'm going to give this three-stars, even if the story that tags along with it is middling & doesn't deserve such an endorsement, as you simply have to see these musical numbers.

Williams has been a bit of a conundrum for me this month.  It's clear that she usually played the same role, and wasn't as great of an actress as someone like Linda Darnell or Ann Sheridan, other women we've profiled in this series.  However, she's emerged as one of my favorites, if only because her movies are so distinctive & fun, and she has an effortless grace in her aquatic performances.  Williams was the rare movie star of Classical Hollywood who was genuinely respected for their offscreen talents, not asked to leave them at the studio gate, and it showed onscreen.  Next month we'll take a look at a woman whom the studio simply wanted to be a pretty face, but she (and history) had different plans entirely.

OVP: Executive Suite (1954)

Film: Executive Suite (1954)
Stars: William Holden, June Allyson, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, Walter Pidgeon, Paul Douglas, Shelley Winters, Louis Calhern, Dean Jagger, Nina Foch
Director: Robert Wise
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Supporting Actress-Nina Foch, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

There is no genre harder to gage in how it will age than straight-dramas.  For any classic film fan, there's really few joys greater than investigating a classic movie for the first time, but I have to say that dramas always have their own risks.  Westerns, whether comedy or drama, you know what you're getting into; same with action-adventures, love stories, horrors, noir, but straight dramas run multiple different pitfalls.  The issues that are being discussed (because almost every drama has an issue at its core) may no longer be applicable, or applicable in the same way.  What might have seemed important at the time could, in fact, be unimportant now, and societal norms may shift to make the film much more dated than you'd hope.  As a result, I headed into Executive Suite (as part of Operation Clean My DVR), not knowing what I was in store for, and actually ended up pleasantly surprised.  The film, with an inexplicably gigantic cast of stars, works despite on-paper seeming like something that might not.

(Spoilers Ahead) Executive Suite uses the ticking clock aspect of storytelling well-while the film isn't quite in real time, it's only the course of about a 24-hour period, where an unseen man, a wealthy and controlling titan of industry, has died, leaving a gaping hole over who will be his successor at a successful furniture manufacturing company.  In the 24-hour period, we see multiple different men jostling with each other and other members of the board trying to figure out who will end up being the CEO, though the chief protagonists in that regard are Don (Holden), the young upstart with a lot of big ideals for the company, and Shaw (March), a practical man who lives mostly by the adoration of the shareholders.

I'll give you one guess over who wins (let's not forget this was made in 1954), but the film actually rises above its predictable nature in that regard.  We're well aware that Holden is the one in command here, and will eventually become the successor, but the film is still pretty riveting nonetheless.  It helps that Robert Wise hired a slate full of movie stars to fill up his picture; it was reported years later that they made this film, similar to the Grand Hotel-style all-star casts of the early 1930's, to compete with television, and while not all of the acting is on the same level, everyone is very watchable and knows how to command a scene when they're expected to do so.  I particularly liked Shelley Winters as a secretary having an affair with her boss, and Fredric March is commendable at making his mustache-twisting villain into a real human being (March is such a fine actor-the fact that he largely made pictures like these without any sort of genre hooks is the only explanation why he isn't still just as famous with casual moviegoers).  Nina Foch won the film's sole acting citation, and she's good, but it's the sort of good you only notice when someone else points it out to you-her character is mysterious, and rises above what could have been completely stock work (think of that scene where she's opposite of March and telling him off as carefully as she can, knowing he's likely to be her next boss), but I'll admit that I wouldn't have paid her much heed had I not been looking for the OVP.

The film's other three nominations are about on the same page-they're all good, though one wonders if they were listed simply because the movie is actually quite good and these were easy categories.  Art Direction is solid-I loved the C-Suite hallway stairs (it's such a nice, elegant touch, the sort that would happen dozens of stories above the earth), though the rest of the film (especially the homes and the other offices), don't have this level of inventive detail.  The costumes are all very appropriately tailored to this level of importance (one wonders if the Mad Men costume designers looked at a film like this for inspiration), and again there's the great touch of Nina Foch's pencil necklace, but overall I was less impressed with other parts, such as the men's suits which felt completely interchangeable.  And finally, the cinematography has a gimmick (never properly seeing the face of the dead CEO, and a first-person camera early on in the picture), which was catnip at the time to that particular AMPAS branch, but again (aside from those great C-Suite hallway shots), there's not a lot to recommend this nomination.

Stil, even if it didn't quite deserve all of its Oscar accolades, I can't help but be fascinated by this movie.  It's wildly watchable, particularly Winters and March, and the sort of film that's less about the acting or visual elements and more about the sum of its parts.  Think of something like Argo where nothing specifically is singled out as "the best" but it's damn fine entertainment.  At least those were my thoughts-how about yours?  Have any of you seen Executive Suite, and if so, what are your thoughts?  If not, share some favorite straight dramas that have stood the test of time in the comments!

OVP: That Forsyte Woman (1949)

Film: That Forsyte Woman (1949)
Stars: Greer Garson, Errol Flynn, Walter Pidgeon, Robert Young, Janet Leigh
Director: Compton Bennett
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Costume Design)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

There are film twists that, currently, seem like obvious choices that years later actually lose a bit of their potency, and this is where I start on this rather dour and overstuffed movie.  The Forsyte Saga, for those familiar with the series of books by John Galsworthy or the Masterpiece Theater classic starring Gina McKee and Rupert Graves, is a terrific soap opera about an upper-middle class family in Britain, and truly great fodder for a film.  However, this particular movie has all of the mechanics of a soap opera, but none of the suspense and fun.

Perhaps I should go to the first, seemingly obvious choice that falls flat on its face, the casting of Errol Flynn as the brutish Soames Forsyte, a man who gets what he wants, especially when told he can't have it.  Flynn seems like an obvious choice for this, and if off-screen rumors are true, was fairly similar to Forsyte in multiple ways.  However, Flynn cannot seem to master any of the emotions that are required to play such a complicated character (Damien Lewis was much better years later), and only manages to be domineering without giving any indication as to the "why" behind his character's decisions.  Granted, this is Classical Hollywood, but Bogart, a similar leading man, was able to do this beautifully in most of his films in the 1940's.  With such a blank slate at the leading man, everyone else's fears and actions seem terribly out-of-balance.

Greer Garson, of course, is intensely watchable in tragic melodramas, and gives her all, but her leading men continue to be too dour and too dull to compare to her.  Walter Pidgeon has undeniable chemistry with her (they appeared in eight films together during her years at MGM), but he's so briefly onscreen, and quite frankly, casting him sort of ruins the suspense of the movie.  (Spoiler Alert, though if you've made it this far, you're probably already familiar) Throughout the film, there's actually a solid question of whether Garson will end up with Flynn or Pidgeon, but casting her opposite her favorite leading man sort of seals the deal.  And the less said about Robert Young, who is badly miscast and is the least appealing of the three leading men whatever Garson's Irene decides toward the end, the better. Garson has the most fun onscreen with Janet Leigh, who is a joy to see in her vivacious young glory.  Janet, like another woman who shares her last name, is eternally attached to a few classic films (in Janet's case, Touch of Evil, The Manchurian Candidate, and of course Psycho) and rarely does anyone notice the remainder of her long and impressive filmography.  As I continue working my way through the 1950's, I expect I shall.

The film received only one Costume Design, but there's little arguing with it.  The Costume Design in the film is beautiful and incredibly bold.  The designs seem to be borrowing as much from the 1940's as they do the 1880's (that remarkable black-and-white number that Garson wears seems far too modern for Victorian England), but it becomes the thing you most look forward to from scene to scene: what decadence will Garson and Leigh be wearing next?  Also of note, and if anyone can point this out to me, I'd appreciate it-this film, according to both IMDB and Wikipedia was released in the US in 1949, but was not nominated until the 1950 Oscars, putting it against the unstoppable Samson and Delilah (it may have had a better chance the year prior).  Anyone know why that is?  Did it really take that long to get the film to Los Angeles?

What about you-which version of the Forsyte Saga do you prefer?  Do you have a favorite Pidgeon/Garson matchup?  And what is truly Janet Leigh's finest hour?