Published: October 28, 2012, Republican Herald
We all like to believe we’re original or unique. We all like to think there’s something about our life that sets us apart from everybody else. For example, in my case, it was my choice to uproot myself from Pottsville, PA and move to Paris, France. How daring, how courageous, how different!
Well, that’s what I used to think until I saw “Paris Seen by Hollywood,” an exhibit filling an immense gallery at the city hall of Paris (Hôtel de Ville), open free to the public until December 15th. There I discovered I am simply a child of my times, the 1950’s and early sixties, the golden age of Paris-Hollywood. An American in Paris with Gene Kelly, Moulin Rouge, named after the famous Pigalle cabaret, with Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gigi with Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier, Love in the Afternoon, Sabrina, Funny Face, all three with the radiant Audrey Hepburn (my role model since a very early age?), Irma la Douce, with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, who plays a hooker with a heart of gold—that’s a lot of Paris to take in at a young and impressionable age.
Though my memories are vague, I think I started going to the movies almost as soon as I could walk. There were still Saturday matinees at the Capitol Theatre on North Centre Street and, after our parents dropped us off out front, we would run down the red-carpeted ramp to the popcorn stand, buy our buttered or plain, and then settle into the worn red velvet seats for a long afternoon of newsreels, cartoons and a feature film or two. Even before the lights went out and the screen lit up, the Capitol itself, shabby and exotic, a gilded Moorish palace going to seed, had the power to transport us far from home.
Bouncing on those seats (Saturday matinees lasted for hours and we had a hard time sitting still) or on those of the Hollywood, just a couple blocks south on the opposite side of Centre Street, we travelled around the world, into the past, into the future, and, very often, far from reality. With no teachers or parents to guide us, we put together our own ideas of the world, of life and of love. All those moving pictures, worth thousands, millions of words, marked us, I believe, for life.
Take Funny Face, for instance (many readers, I’m sure, enjoy watching these “old” movies on Turner Classic Movies, which often programs Paris-Hollywood classics). This 1956 film with Audrey Heburn, playing an American ingénue, and Fred Astaire, a sophisticated fashion photographer, is a modern take on the “ugly duckling” theme. In her home surroundings (New York City), Audrey Hepburn is a homely girl, working in a bookstore. Whisk her off to Paris and she is transformed! The gawky girl becomes the very model of Parisian elegance. Dressed in Givenchy fashions created especially for her, she embodies the spirit of the city, carefree, beautiful, sophisticated, and intelligent, no less. Gee, no wonder I’m here. Who could ask or wish for more?
Funny Face, directed by Stanley Donen, marks a turning point in Paris-Hollywood. It is the film which made Audrey Hepburn a star. It is also one of the first Hollywood films actually shot in the streets of Paris. Up until that time, nearly all were shot on lots in and around Hollywood. MGM had the “biggest” Paris, located in Culver City, where An American in Paris was made. This 1951 musical, with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, sings and dances us through the city, serving up delightful clichés about Paris that American tourists are still searching for today.
Gene Kelly plays a World War II vet, come to Paris to make it as an artist. He lives in a garret beneath those famous Parisian rooftops immortalized in dozens of Hollywood films (remember Disney’s 1971 AristoCats or the more recent Ratatouille?). He falls in love. There’s another man in the picture, but everything works out in the end. But before that can happen, Kelly and Caron, the film’s true lovers, dance soulfully to Gershwin music beneath a bridge over the Seine, and Kelly imagines a happy ending for their love. In this 30-minute dream sequence, set entirely in painted decors, Kelly dances in and out of Impressionist paintings by Renoir and Monet. In one scene, he brings to life a dancer in a painting by Toulouse Lautrec, truly animating the work with the genius of his dance.
Americans have an on-going love affair with Impressionist painting and I’m ready to bet that An American in Paris played a part in keeping that love alive, as did the 1954 film French Cancan, directed by Jean Renoir. In this movie devoted to the cabarets of Montmartre in the year 1900, Renoir pays a tribute to his father, Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, who immortalized one of the most famous in his painting Le Moulin de la Galette. This film also revives the French cancan, a forgotten dance brought back to life thanks to the silver screen.
The year 1900 also marks the beginning of American filmmakers’ love affair with Paris. That year, Paris hosted the World’s Fair and Thomas Edison travelled to the city with cameras and a team that filmed Paris in motion. Dominating the skyline, the Eiffel Tower, only 11 years old, begins its career as the symbol of the city, destined to appear in hundreds of American films.
In all, there have been over 800 Hollywood movies set in Paris and it would be no exaggeration to say the city has become a part of us. Lon Chaney as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Greta Garbo as Camille, “la Dame aux Camélias,” Audrey Hepburns’s Funny Face, Maurice Chevalier in Gigi, all of them Hollywood icons, though, among those actors, only Chaney was actually born in the United States.
Does that mean I can thank the former Hollywood and Capitol Theatres of Pottsville for my being in Paris today? Yes, in part, without a doubt. Have I found the mythic Paris of Hollywood I came looking for? Yes and no, but mostly no. It only exists on screen and in our hearts.
But I have found something else, a subtle ingredient of many of those films. I’ve discovered a great big world, composed of many peoples, cultures and languages. That’s what Paris has become today. And I got my first taste for it, bouncing on a red velvet seat at a Saturday matinee at the Capitol.
