The Last Time I Saw Paris — Directed by Richard Brooks — Drama. A novelist returns to Paris on a mission and relives the beauty and sorrow of his marriage after World War II. 90 minutes Color 1954.
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At this moment, Elizabeth Taylor was the most beautiful woman in the world. She is 22 perhaps, and she is like a ripe plum. Helen Rose, who dressed her, has put her only in primary colors, no prints, realizing that nothing must compete with our rapt attention to her face. I am 77 and grew up with this girl, and with the history of her face as she grew from a child in a Lassie movie, through a horse-loving teenager in National Velvet, through her first kiss, and her teenage marriage, and the birth of her children. What was that face becoming? For the most part, she never played a woman who had a job, and in adult roles she largely played leading women to men who were the focus of the story, as here, with Van Johnson. However, the focus of the story is not always the focus of the camera or the focus of our attention. Here the focus of the camera, whenever it can be, is on her, and besides one cannot one’s eyes off her. Look at the great black and white domino party scene where she is profile. Her profile is fabulous. That is to say, it is the profile of a face which writes the story of the culture of its time. This history has to do with our attention to The Visible Ideal in whatever form it may take. Since, in her face, that ideal exists, our gaze upon it includes the questions: is it immortal, how will it change, what will become of it? There is a spiritual force in such beauty; at least there is in the beholder of it. All culture is the arrival of spiritual force in the plastic forms of art, and this face possessed it, especially in the 1950s when culture in America was at a despicable low. In the place of that mediocrity was this face. But it is not the face alone that is riveting and important, for she is an actress playing a part, and such she must bring into her craft the fabric of her nature. She is that rare thing, a great romantic actress. So what we see is that she is so loving and in such pain about that love; that she is quietly witty and forgiving. Her equipment includes a Voice With Money In It, as Fitzgerald described Daisy in The Great Gatsby. Indeed all these qualities make her the perfect Fitzgerald heroine, and Fitzgerald wrote Babylon Revisited upon which this movie is based, and he also wrote a famous screenplay of it, on which this film may be based, for it certainly has beautiful dialogue, in scene after scene, all played exquisitely by Elizabeth Taylor. Van Johnson has a line in the sardonic and the vexed which does not really carry us into his heart. But Walter Pidgeon is enchanting as the bon viveur father, and Donna Reed is usefully stiff-necked as Taylor’s older, mean sister. This is an essential film for American cultural history. Her beauty and her talent in romantic roles cut through everything at that time. Do not miss it. It is the last romantic role Elizabeth Taylor played and the greatest.
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