Paris Bound

,...based on the play by Philip Barry. Jim (Fredric March) and Mary (Ann Harding) get married, although they claim to have a modern, cosmopolitan attitude toward the institution. After several years together, during which they have a son, Jim takes a business trip to Europe where he runs into Noel (Carmelita Geraghty), who used to pine for him. Meanwhile, back in the US, Mary's composer friend Richard (Leslie Parrish), who has been in love with Mary for years, hopes to make things more intimate while Jim is away. Can Jim and Mary's "modern marriage" withstand these extramarital developments?

This marked Ann Harding's big screen debut after years as a stage star. March, too, was making his mark in the new talkies. Having appeared in a handful of silent films in uncredited bit parts. 1929 saw him in seven features, this being the fourth. The Pre-Code elements are self-evident, with the extramarital shenanigans, but this is never racy, really, and maintains an air of sophistication. The leads are both good, but there isn't much depth to the proceedings. Still, it's a classy diversion, although good prints are hard to find.

This is one of those dry soap operas that were offered by small-budget studios (in this case, Pathé) since the 1910s. It's a tepid affair where the characters talk a lot about love and loss of love and running away and leaving their spouses. They have unreal expectations and reactions, ones that only existed on the stage or screen. When Mary Hutton (Ann Harding) starts off her marriage to Jim Hutton (Fredric March) with a declaration that they, as modern, free thinking sophisticates, should allow themselves to see others, right then and there you know this little scheme is guaranteed to backfire, especially when we have seen at the wedding the couple's destined interlopers. That the groom's father has apparently pulled this open marriage stuff on his wife, leaving them unhappy, also is an early tip-off as to the events soon to unravel. Incidently, this film has only about a half minute that has anything to do with Paris. Being produced in 1929, one expects something like a "theme song" that virtually every film had, but although the talented Josiah Zuro was the musical director, it has a spare, uninteresting track. One of the high spots of the film has Mary's paramour (Leslie Fenton) writing a ballet score, and she imagines it performed with a full cast of musicians and dancers, who glide across her room scene in ghostly double and triple exposures. Trouble is, it's lifeless and instantly forgettable. I see this was Ann Harding's film debut as well as cast member Ilka Chase. Well, everybody has to start somewhere.

Slow and stilted, this film is obviously the adaptation of a play--all the action takes place (or could) in one room. The director shows his tin ear (and whatever is the visual equivalent) by starting the movie with Ann Harding and Fredric March going through the wedding service, which goes on and on and on. The two attractive leads, both highly accomplished actors, are the reason for seeing this, as are such distinctly period touches as his saying to her "Take a deep breath" and handing her a cigarette. Ilka Chase also makes two brief, welcome appearances as a fashionable, flippant socialite. But the plot is minuscule and is also well past its use-by date--we're told that a good wife overlooks a husband's affairs if he really loves her and the other women mean nothing to him. And how does she know he feels that way? Because he says so!

This dated adaption of one of Philip Barry's lesser known works serves as the film debut of Ann Harding and the fourth film for Fredric March since coming west to Hollywood. Both Harding and March show that they have the right stuff for lengthy film careers.

Paris Bound is a lot less known than The Philadelphia Story, The Animal Kingdom, Holiday, and Without Love mostly because it isn't as good as the others. The film opens with Harding and March exchanging their vows. But they're going to be mature about it. It will be open, but discreet.

Which is all some former lovers, Carmelita Geraghty for him and Leslie Fenton for her is all the encouragement they need.

This film could use a restoration if for no other reason it has two noted Hollywod luminaries and it's by a major American playwright.. The leads perform well, but Paramount hadn't mastered talkie technique.

Even minor Philip Barry should be preserved and enjoyed.

The rediscovered Paris Bound is, as other reviewers have pointed out, something of a disappointment. It might be considered the quintessential talkie in that the characters talk and talk and talk and talk and, frankly, not to much purpose. Philip Barry had a certain reputation as playwright and Paris Bound had a certain success on the stage because it treated a subject that was still regarded as extremely risqué in the US but it is an absolutely dire piece of work. Passages quoted in other reviews give a good idea how "precious" and artificial the dialogue is and comments in other reviews also reveal how ambiguous the treatment is. The fault again lies largely in US society which required such controversial subjects to be couched in fatuous double-talk and to be presented in a totally misleading fashion.

So the controversial nature of the play/film is all a matter of trompe l'oeil. The "liberal" couple are not very liberal at all (even at the outset) but quite extraordinarily uxorious, so that, in a play/film supposedly about adultery, we have in fact an abundance of passionate husband-wife kissing and precious little adultery (talk figures strongly there too) and the conclusion is of course deeply conservative. Adultery, it would seem, is just an illusion; blink twice and it just goes away. The husband's divorced parents (arguably the genuine liberals) are treated rather as aberrant monsters.

Barry shows essentially the same ambiguity in The Philadelphia Story which similarly toys with ideas of divorce and adultery, to end with a predictably conservative conclusion. Divorce, like adultery, is also apparently an illusion. Laugh twice and that goes away too. The Philadelphia Story is also extremely talkative but has the distinct advantage of being funny which Paris Bound is most certainly not.

Virtually the only "American" film-makers who manged to break through this "no sex please, this is the USA" barrier, were Erich von Stroheim and Ernest Lubitsch. Stroheim capitalised on his established wartime reputation as a "German villain" to get away with things(possible because they were heavily marked "villain") which no other director in the US could get away with. Lubitsch, after long years of producing light comedy and musicals to establish a huge if slightly bogus reputation, and by dint of a good deal of skillful mise en scène and a certain low cunning,was able to produce a remarkable film like Design for Living and make light of adultery in A Certain Feeling or To Be or Not To Be. But these remained the exceptions that proved the rule.

The Stroheim logic was peculiar to his own situation and rather ingenious. When a character has been shown, with official approval, raping a nurse and defenestrating a baby in a propaganda film, it is a bit difficult to find grounds on which to then censor the deviant behaviour of a succession of rather similar characters played by the selfsame actor in his fiction films (Blind Husbands or Foolish Wives or Blind Husbands)

But even so Stroheim had to fight hard to maintain his independence and had plenty of problems with censorship, particularly on the part of the snip-happy producers who would eventually succeed in destroying his directing career completely. He was after all at the time only the best director that the US had ever produced (by quite a margin). Who needs such people? Gloria Swanson was probably right in thinking that even Stroheim would not have got away with Queen Kelly as originally filmed - the later scenes, cut from the version eventually shown, are still quite troubling to watch even today. She is wrong in blaming (as she later did) the Hays Code, which did not then exist but, contrary to popular belief, there was plenty of pre-code censorship and the Hays Code merely "codified" rules that very largely already existed.

The difference between "pre-code" and "post-code" is for the most part just wishful thinking. Most censorship, before and afterwards, was in any case, as with Queen Kelly, self-censorship by the producers, constantly terrified of any kind of controversy, which, in those days, still had the power to ruin careers and conceivably even institutions. The Hays Code (in any case their own creation) simply gave producers a convenient alibi. So it is not really the case that the Code prevented directors from doing this, that or the other (particularly the other) but rather that it gave carte blanche to the producers and their henchmen (the so-called "editors", but sometimes more accurately described, even in credits, as "cutters") to chop the films about so as to render them "harmless" in the way they were so fond of doing.

The "Lubitsch touch" was, in the end, a more sustainable method of getting round the rules than "the man you love to hate" method, especially as it was a myth originally created by the production companies themselves. Lubitsch simply broadened the definition.

To return to this film, Fredric March is adequate (the least talkative character, he doesn't really have much to do but kiss) and Ann Harding is, as ever, dazzling, but her two other films made in the year, Her Private Affair - attacked, ironically, by reviewers at that address as being based on a "failed" play - and Condemned are both better films than Paris Bound although this was the film that made Harding a star because of the rather spurious reputation achieved by the play.