Paris Interlude

Despite my writing this blog for 18 years now, it always surprises how many 1930s movies are that I still don't know about. The latest example of this came when I watched the programmer Paris Interlude.

The movie opens up in 1927, when Charles Lindbergh was making his transatlantic flight in The Spirit of St. Louis, and everybody in Paris waiting for Lindbergh to land. Especially the reporters, who wanted to be the first to get the story. Among those reporters is Sam Colt (Otto Kruger), who was a flyboy in World War I before he lost his left arm. He's become a reporter since, and at one time was a good reporter before he turned to drink and is the sort of dissolute ex-pat who was a thing back in popular culture in the years just before the Depression, although Paris Interlude was released in 1934. In any case, Colt enlists the help of aspiring writer Pat Wells (Robert Young) to help write the stories in a sort of apprentice relationship. It's not enough for Pat to make a living, and he wants to write fiction any way.

All of these characters spend just as much time at a local watering hole that has next to nothing French about it instead being a place for Americans to recreate their fantasy of what Parisian café life is about. Among these people are aimless Julie (Madge Evans), who moons over Sam because he's just so dashing and handsome, while not having any idea what to do with life. There's also fashion designer Cassie Bond (Una Merkel), and Ham (Edward Brophy), a naïve journalist on his way to the Soviet Union to cover the situation there although he never makes it for whatever reason.

Sam proposes to Julie and plans to take her back to the States, and she even tells her folks back there she's planning to come back a wife. But Sam gets an assignment covering the slow-burning Chinese civil war (at the time the movie was set, this would have been before Japan invaded Manchuria, although the movie was released some years after), forcing him to leave Julie behind. She feels she can't go back to America, so she starts working writing about the haute couture scene in Paris with her articles illustrated by Cassie. Pat falls in love with Julie but can't support her, while another American abroad, golfer Rex Fleming (George Meeker) shows up. And then news comes in that Sam has been shot down in China and is presumably dead.

Except that in a movie like this you have to expect that he's not in fact dead. So 20 minutes later into the movie, on the day that Julie is finally about to marry Sam who has sold a story, Sam arrives back in Paris looking just like he would have looked the day he was shot down in China which makes no sense in terms of plot. Wouldn't he have gotten cleaned up? But Sam's arrival makes Julie wonder just whom she should marry.

For some reason, I went into Paris Interlude thinking this movie was going to be a comedy. It isn't at all, and mostly wasn't intended to be apart from the comic relief character. It's not exactly a bad movie, but it's definitely the sort of thing that would have been what movie exhibitors wanted in 1934: something that could run for a week or two as the second feature and give audiences a movie to come to, only to fade into obscurity as something newer came to the screen. It's with good reason that I had never heard of this one before it showed up on the TCM schedule the last time it did.