I viewed this on impulse because it was based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. Directed by Richard Brooks, probably Hollywood’s most accomplished literary adaptor in the ’50s and ’60s, and he pulled off for Fitzgerald here what was so conspicuously failed with the several adaptations of Hemingway around the same time.
This film manages to condense the sheer mixture of satin-soaked romanticism, worldly cynicism, and dry wit of Fitzgerald’s writing into a decent film mixture. It even overcomes the potentially debilitating casting of Van Johnson, he of the perpetually small-town soda jerk looks, and Elizabeth Taylor.
Johnson is unusually intense and convincing as a good but increasingly suffering man; Taylor gave what I feel was her best performance in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof for Brooks and she nearly matches it here, which suggests Brooks had an intuitive understanding of her. The plot, updated to WW2, has Johnson playing Charles Wills, a Stars & Stripes reporter who arrives in Paris on the night of the Liberation and is kissed at random by Taylor seeking out Yank uniforms.
She plays Helen, daughter of Amercian bohemian James Ellswirth (Walter Pidgeon), who coasts through life in a hedonistic lifestyle supported by horse betting, debt, and promises of large tracts of Texas oil land – that has not yet produced a drop. Shortly after Taylor’s fated kiss, Johnson meets, in the Cafe Dhingo that is the fulcrum of the story owned by Kurt Kaszner’s Maurice, Donna Reed, who plays her sister Marion. She invites Wills an his french buddy Claude (George Dolenz) to a party Pidgeon is giving with their secreted supply of booze.
Against this heady backdrop of a rejoicing France returning to light and life, Charlie and Helen fall in love, and Helen talks him into staying behind, marrying her, and joining her and her father’s cheerfully disreputable lifestyle. Set on becoming a novelist, Charlie labors without success for five years, meanwhile working as a low-paid journalist. He and Helen have a kid, Vickie (Sandy Descher, she who screams “Them!” in that film), but he becomes increasingly despondent.
Luck changes when one of the dead oil wells starts producing and suddenly, in true Fitzgerald fashion, they gain that hollow-sourced horn of plenty that always ruins. Sure enough, soon they’re frustrated with each-other and dabbling wth other lovers – the moral torpitude of which is indicated in their choice of new partners; for Johnson, Eva Gabor, playing a multi-divorce heiress, and for Taylor, a tennis bum played by a very young Roger Moore, who resembles nothing less plastic than a Ken doll. This less-than-convincing segment of the film nonetheless results in a terrfic crack-up where Johnson tries in to beat up Moore, not even landing a punch as he falls over drunk.
Stumbling home tanked, he passes out on the stairs inside after chaining the door shut. When Taylor returns, she can’t get in, catching the beautifully melodramatic sight of her standing soaking wet amidst snow with her life falling apart. The last third continues in a very downbeat fashion although the very end finally provides a feel-good touch that is delivered with an impeccable lack of corn. The great cinematography and MGM gloss make up for occasional plasticity , very much capturing the arc of a star-crossed, delirious love story that becomes a family tragedy with emotional depth and wry humor.
