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 1929 early sound film based on a lesser Phillip Barry play takes seriously the very people that Cole Porter so devastatingly satirized in his immortal songs. We even have an arty ballet montage staged by Stanislavski's assistant Richard Boleslavski to prove that pretension is not just a recent occurrence. Bad art has been with us always. This is the film debut of the beautiful and lady-like Anne Harding, the perfect upper class American girl that Katherine Hepburn was to play more successfully a few years later in Barry's best play. Fredric March, the best leading man of the day, does a lot of serious kissing here to justify that he really loves his wife and kid despite his weakness of character. What seemed madly sophisticated then in 1929 seems enormously silly now. After watching this, just put on your favorite Cole Porter album. His songs are still with us to remind us that once upon a time anything went.

Dated, stagey and suffering from a static camera, this early Philip Barry play still manages to pack a wallop due to Barry's wonderful dialogue and the strengths of the leads, Frederick March and Ann Harding, right at the beginning of their careers, but possessed of a naturalness that carries this movie along. Thanks to the Vitaphone Project for reuniting the rediscovered soundtrack to the moving image.

I watched the 1929 Paris Bound, based on a play be Philip Barry and starring Ann Harding in her film debut and Fredric March. They play a loving couple who claim their love will never be tainted by others. March's parents caused a scandal in their set when she divorced him after his affair. They argue at the wedding that the woman was foolish and cost them both their home because of her divorce actions.

With that set up we see March and Harding through their first happy years of marriage. They are devoted but very modern. When business takes March to Paris, he goes alone. They believe a "break" is good for their marriage and she has her work with Richard (Leslie Fenton) on a ballet score. But into this bliss creeps the jealous Noel (Carmelita Geraghty) who has never gotten over losing March to Harding. She sees in the society news that March has gone to Europe alone and she chases after him.

After Harding learns of this, she decides to have an affair with Fenton but March returns home. Will they break up? Will they be able to patch things up? Harding is just wonderful in her first film. She's quite natural and at ease. March is also very good. Together they avoid the stagy acting and over pronunciation that mars other early talkies. Fenton and Geraghty are also good. Ilka Chase takes honors among the supporting cast (also in her film debut). Co-stars include George Irving, Hallam Cooley, Charlotte Walker, Juliette Crosby, and Rose Tapley.

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.