Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786302224405
Format: Color
ISBN: 6302224403
Label: MGM (Warner)
Languages: Array
Manufacturer: MGM (Warner)
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: MGM (Warner)
Release Date: 1994-03-07
Running Time: 116
Studio: MGM (Warner)
Theatrical Release Date: 1954

Customer Rating:
Summary: Quality bad, story is good...
Comment: The movie centers around Charles (Johnson), who gets back from the war and falls in love with a woman in Paris, Helen (Taylor) who's a fellow American. Her sister Marion (Reed) is in love with him, but he marries Helen, never knowing Marion loves him. In turn, she marries a man named Claude.

As time goes on, the marriage between Charles and Helen gets stale; they both flirt with and date others; he becomes a frustrated writer who can't get work and drinks. His drinking eventually has a tragic consequence that I won't reveal, but he leaves Paris and returns two years later to find his daughter. Very sad movie with a bittersweet ending.

My complaint with the movie is that it needs to be remastered. But the story is excellent and worth seeing more than once.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Badly in need of restoration
Comment: The cinematographer for this film was the legendary four-time Oscar winner Joseph Ruttenberg. But sadly the film has suffered greatly over time, and was not restored before being digitized for DVD. Throughout the film, the color and brightness constantly change and flicker, to the point of being very distracting, not to mention disappointing. The storyline is a bit of a soap opera, made enjoyable by terrific actors and the wonderful Parisian scenery. But sadly, the deterioration of the film saps it of its vitality. I hope that one day it will be restored.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: 5 stars for the movie not the transfer
Comment: I can't believe how many versions of "The Last Time I Saw Paris" there are and yet NONE are in widescreen and none seem to be a good digital transfer! I can't image what's up with this movie! The movie itself has a great storyline and Elzabeth Taylor looks hotter than ever! Worth watching but can't understand why this movie keeps being shortchanged over and over again!

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: The movie betrayed the dry-eyed spirit of the original material...
Comment: "The Last Time I Saw Paris" converted the author's sensibility downward, to compassion and soap opera... The movie therefore betrayed the dry-eyed spirit of the original material... The first mistake, though, was in changing the era from the Lost Generation Twenties to post-World War II... The jazz age ambiance, recollected in the story, the mystique of Paris in the Twenties--these key tokens of Fitzgerald's sensibility were missing...

Even more damaging than the switch in era is the attempt to expand the characters whose motivations are only sketched lightly in the short story... Told in flashback, the story centers on a successful American novelist (Van Johnson) who returns to Paris and a reunion with the child he left in the custody of his sister-in-law (Donna Reed), since the death of his wife...

The movie and the actors do not move the characters from point A to point B: why, for instance, do husband and wife reverse roles, she transformed from party girl to sober wife who wants to go home to America, he collapsing from serious writer to disappointed drunk...

Van Johnson lacks the mythic stature to suggest other than a poor man's version of the great, doomed Fitzgerald... And Liz was too young and inexperienced at the time to embody an arch-neurotic, part a malicious temptress, and part an aiding angel...

The role is a cumulation of the Taylor ingénue: the goodtime flirt, cunningly stealing a man from her older sister; the spoiled daughter of a fast living phony; the irresponsible party girl with a good heart underneath it all; the sober young mother and wife; the defiant adulteress; the frail spirit cut down by the forces of nature...

At each "station," she is on home ground, but the part comes out in bits and pieces rather than a coherent whole: the character, finally, does not add up... It may be partly Taylor vapidity (Beverly Hills didn't prepare her for Paris), but it's also the script and the direction: that saintly woman, forgiving all, has very little connection to the blithe spirit who steals her sister's man and parties with non-stop frenzy...

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: The Last Time I Saw Paris
Comment: I enjoy the movie or else I wouldn't have ordered it. However the quality of the film was very poor. It was grainy and the sound was not good quality. I was disappointed.

---