The Last Time I Saw Paris

As World War II ends in Europe, Stars and Stripes journalist Charles Wills (Van Johnson) is on the streets of Paris, covering the celebrations. He suddenly is grabbed by a beautiful woman, who kisses him and disappears. Charles follows the crowd to Café Dhingo and meets another pretty woman named Marion Ellswirth (Donna Reed). The mutual attraction is instant, and she invites him to join her father's celebration of the end of the war in Europe. Charles, Marion and her persistent French suitor Claude Matine (George Dolenz) arrive at the Ellswirth household, and we find that the woman who had kissed Charles is Marion's younger sister Helen (Elizabeth Taylor). Their father, James Ellswirth (Walter Pidgeon), had survived World War I and promptly joined the Lost Generation. Unlike most drifters, he never grew out of it, raising his two daughters to desire such a lifestyle. Helen takes after her father and uses her beauty to sustain a life of luxury even though they are flat broke. Marion goes the other way and looks for serious-minded and conventional young men such as Claude, an aspiring prosecutor, and Charles, the future novelist. Charles and Helen start dating and fall in love. After Helen recovers from a near-death case of pneumonia, they get married and settle in Paris. James good-naturedly joins the happy family of Charles, with Helen eventually having a daughter Vickie (Sandy Descher). Marion, having lost Charles to Helen, agrees to marry Claude. Charles struggles to make ends meet with his meager salary, unsuccessfully works on his novels and looks after Vickie. The Last Time I Saw Paris is a 1954 Technicolor romantic drama made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It is loosely based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "Babylon Revisited." It was directed by Richard Brooks, produced by Jack Cummings and filmed on locations in Paris and the MGM backlot. The screenplay was by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Richard Brooks. The film starred Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson in his last role for MGM, with Walter Pidgeon, Donna Reed, Eva Gabor, Kurt Kasznar, George Dolenz, Sandy Descher, Odette, and (a then-unknown) Roger Moore in his Hollywood debut. The film's title song, by composer Jerome Kern and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, was already a classic when the movie was made and inspired the movie's title. Though the song had already won an Oscar after its film debut in 1941's Lady Be Good, it is featured much more prominently in The Last Time I Saw Paris. It can be heard in many scenes, either being sung by Odette or being played as an instrumental. More on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Time_I_Saw_Paris

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