Afternoon Delight

Coming up on Tuesday, August 24, TCM is giving us a day full of the movies of Maurice Chevalier. One that I haven't blogged about before is Love in the Afternoon, and since I had that one on DVR, I decided to watch it to do a post on now.

After a brief prologue on how love blooms in Paris (which is unfortunately in black-and-white here), we're introduced to Claude Chavasse (that's Chevalier). He's a very discreet private investigator in Paris, widowed with an adult daughter in Ariane (Audrey Hepburn) who studies cello at the conservatory with possible boyfriend Michel (Van Doude). Coming to visit Claude is an unnamed man called Monsieur X in the credits, played by John McGiver. Monsieur X thinks that his wife is stepping out on him and has hired Chavasse to prove or disprove the allegation.

Claude has been peering into a suite at the Hotel Ritz every night, where American playboy Frank Flannagan (Gary Cooper) has been meeting a woman who comes there in a veil to avoid being identified. Every night they listen to a gypsy combo and eat and dance unti the band leaves, leaving the couple alone. Monsieur X decides that he's going to catch them in flagrante delicto and then shoot Flannagan!

Ariane, meanwhile, has been taking an interest in her father's profession, going through the files that Dad has and even eavesdropping on conversations with clients, which doesn't seem good for Dad's reputation, but nobody seems to realize what's going on. But the upshot is that Ariane hears about Monsieur X's plans and is shocked, since she doesn't want anybody to be shot. So she decides to break into Flannagan's room through the balcony to get Madame X out of the room such that Monsieur X will find Flannagan together with Ariane.

This also results in Flannagan deciding to spend the evening with Ariane, and the next day with her, but that will be it because Flannagan is a businessman who travels the world and has a girl in every port, or would if his business took him to ports. Still, Ariane follows Flannagan through the news clippings, and since the movie is maybe halfway through its 130-minute running time, we know it's not over by any means.

Sure enough, same time next year more or less, Ariane and Michel are going to the Paris Opera House to see a production. They've got cheap balcony seats, being poor students, but when Ariane looks through her opera glasses she sees Flannagan with another woman. He's back! And sure enough, they run into each other in the foyer during intermission, leading Ariane to go back to Flannagan's suite at the Ritz, since he takes the same suite every time he's in the city.

One catch is that Flannagan doesn't know anything about Ariane. And she's not about to tell him the truth that she's just a poor music student, since she probably expects Flannagan to reject her if that truth were known. Since she's been reading Dad's case files, she has all sorts of stories to make up about having been "the other woman" in various men's lives, none of which are true, of course, at least in the sense that Ariane was never the other woman.

Ariane jilts Flannagan when she discovers just how much he's been lying, leading him to go on a bender and try to shake it off at a steam bath, which is where he meets... Monsieur X. Monsieur X thinks the best thing for Flanagan to do is to seek help from a detective to find out about this mystery woman, and boy doesn't Monsieur X know just the right detective....

Quite a few of the reviews over on IMDb have a problem with Love in the Afternoon on the grounds that Gary Cooper seems to be much too old for Audrey Hepburn here (their real-life age difference was 28 years), exacerbated by the fact that Cooper was beginning to age rapidly and looks older than he really was. I actually didn't have that problem. We know from the beginning that Cooper is a playboy, so if any of his actions seem creepy they're no more so than any of the other screen playboys we've seen. And I'm amazed that Hepburn's character couldn't figure this out, considering how she'd been going through her father's case files. If the movie had a problem for me, it's that it runs over two hours, and really could and should have been trimmed by a good half hour (I'm thinking of Indiscreet here).

On the bright side, the performances are good, and we don't have to hear Maurice Chevalier sing, other than a bit of incidental music, since music is so important to the movie, both with Ariane's character and the gypsy band. The old standard "Fascination" plays constantly in various arrangements.

Love in the Afternoon was directed by Billy Wilder, who made several all-time classics. This one isn't one of his best, but it's better than some of the reviews would have you believe. If I were trying to get people interested in the films of Billy Wilder, there are a bunch of other things I'd pick first, but for anyone who already likes Wilder, Love in the Afternoon isn't a bad watch.