Burl reviews April in Paris! (1952)

With a handful of posies, it’s Burl, here to review a spring musical for you! Yes, you’ve guessed right: it’s April in Paris, as, currently, it’s April everywhere, for a few more days at least! Ha ha! This picture features the unlikely romantic pairing of Doris Day, whom we know so well from suspense thrillers like Midnight Lace, and Ray Bolger, whose shirt here is stuffed even more than it was in The Wizard of Oz! Ha ha!

The plot is rather contrived, even for a musical! Bolger’s character, S. Winthrop Putnam, is an uptight nebbish who works in the State Department, in the position of Assistant to the assistant to the Deputy Undersecretary to the Assistant to the Secretary of State, or something like that! His grumpy boss is played by Paul Harvey, who sounds just like a more polished Lon Chaney Jr. if you close your eyes! Anyway, they’re planning some kind of arts festival in Paris, for which they propose to gather the crème de la crème of American culture and ship them all to France! But the invitation to Ethel Barrymore goes by mistake to a brassy chorine named Ethel “Dynamite” Jackson, played of course by Day!

After a touching goodbye party from her theatre pals, Bolger arrives to inform her of the mistake, which of course devastates her! Up to this point, I had assumed Bolger’s character was a secondary fussbudget character of the type that used to be played by Franklin Pangborn or Mischa Auer or Edward Everett Horton, and that the romantic lead had simply not showed up yet! Of course I knew Bolger was a great entertainer, and in particular a fantastic dancer, but I was still expecting the real hero to show up any minute, ha ha!

But no! Anyway, after the old “The boss thinks the underling’s decision to represent America with an everywoman instead of a star is inspired” plot twist, Dynamite is back in (Ethel Barrymore’s reaction to the mix-up is never recorded), and the long middle section of the picture takes place (rather unconvincingly) aboard ship! Ha ha, here the Frenchman character played ingratiatingly by Claude Dauphin, whom we know from Phantom of the Rue Morgue, and who later became President of Earth in Barbarella, comes to the fore! Having earlier sung a song apparently called “Give Me Your Lips,” he plays matchmaker, sort of, and this leads to a long scene in the passage outside the adjacent cabins of Day and Bolger, in which their mutual lust is turned up to eleven!

Then we get a fake wedding, which means, by the puritanical rules of the period, that Dauphin and his pal have to act in a very un-French  manner and prevent Day and Bolger from consummating their non-marriage! Their cabins are rigged by the crafty Frenchmen, and this leads to several laffs and some outrage from Bolger’s boss! Finally everybody gets to Paris, which is represented by stock footage and stage sets, and there are further complications and an excellent nightclub number from Dauphin and Day! Ha ha, it’s one of the highlights! There’s also a surprising revelation about our Frenchman, Dauphin, and the last shot is of course set before a dropsheet depiction of the Eiffel Tower!

All of this is fine, even if the whole thing seems to lack the authorial voice a director other than David Butler might have given it! For most of the picture Day and Bolger seem an ill-fitting couple, it being particularly hard to see what the likeably bland Dynamite would see in a nervous prig like S. Winthrop Putnam! Ha ha! But the scene in the passage is a most definite exception: the air is thick with erotic feeling, and one can see reflected in their eyes the sideways bedroom waltz each craves to perform with the other!

It’s a pretty standard 1950s Hollywood musical: bright and colourful; tedious at times, but also occasionally funny; bizarrely moralistic; rah-rah American, though not too obnoxious with it; a few good numbers and some impressive dancing! One wishes the loose-limbed Bolger was given more to do, but after all, he was straitjacketed by his character! He does get a decent tap number in! Ha ha, I give April in Paris two collapsing beds!