Just Like Heaven

Tiny Tiffany Studios was a low-budget studio that came and went. Their films generally are what you'd expect from a so-called poverty row production company--quickly made and with few frills, stars or decent scripts. "Just Like Heaven" is certainly no great film, but at least it looks pretty good considering who made it.

The film is set in France. However, it's a bizarro world version of France. Some of the actors have reasonable French accents, some (especially Fifi) are more ridiculous caricatures because they completely overdo the accent and behaviors and several, inexplicably, seem about as French as a bottle of Budweiser! This sort of inconsistency annoyed me and I really wanted to slug Fifi in the mouth and tell her to shut up!

As for the story, it begins with an annoying jerk, Tobey, acting as if he owns the streets in the neighborhood with his balloon business. When a traveling show arrives, he tries to chase them off and treats the sweet lady, Mimi, harshly. However, through the course of the film, the gruff Tobey begins to fall for her...which is tough as Jean also loves her and will say anything to win her.

The film is a mildly interesting love triangle and the three stars playing these parts do an okay job. But Fifi is LESS subtle than Pepe le Pew and the film comes off as a very inconsistent and occasionally dopey film...though a nice looking one.

The plot and the narrative is better than good, for its simplicity.

Newell, as the street-vendor, who thinks the spot he had been using for selling his balloons as his own, is natural, in the character as well as the behaviour. We see this often by those who claim the place their own, by longtime use even if sans Official endorsement, and when someone comes with the letter of allotment of his space, the resentment is natural. Sometimes it is violent, and sometimes when the law and order is strict, a bit subversive, as in this move.

Jean (Gaston), as Mimi (Anita)'s childhood friend, who wants to be her sweetheart, but she thinks as brother, is the bone in this pudding, and unlike most bones I see, the character, and its portrayal, had not been too jarring or villainous. The other bone, Fifi (d'Avril) the night club dancer, who quite naturally wanted to convert Tobey (Newell)'s artistic skit into cabaret act, had been many shades darker, but believable.

There are two points which bring down the merits of the movie.

First is that despite looking lovely, the heroine Mimi (Anita) was just too young. She was in real life just about 14 or 15 then. The character she played was 16 (and by the end, since the movie traced more than a year, she would have been 17 to 18), but she looked hardly 12 or 13. Not the age to fall so desperately in love. In fact she even behaved quite a few times like a child, that she in real life was. Whereas Newell (25 then), looked almost of avancular age for her, may be for his physique, Gaston (a few years older) looked younger.

The second and more damning was the trying to squeeze in the tale, which resulted in seemingly discontinuities. Of course that could be result of editing, to cut it down to size, since the direction, or the story telling, in the segments was alright. It just left a feeling that it could have been just a bit stretched, to fill these gaps, rather than leaving it to the viewer to fill those in. This also, in my opinion, helps in building the characters, a few of whom (especially Fifi), didn't get enough space to do that, though her behaviour and acting could compensate, but it would have been better if she was allowed to do it, on screen.

Overall- this movie had been far better than many of the movies I had seen of this era of talkies in their infancy. I could watch it through without the need to fast-forward or postponing.

And yes, as pointed out, there had been quite liberal use of French, though that didn't jar.

A prestige production by the poverty row outfit Tiffany attempting to capture some of the magic of Frank Borzage's contemporaneous productions of the late silent and early sound eras; with a waif-like heroine played by a fifteen year-old Anita Louise.

Entrusted to the dependable Roy William Neill and done proud by the lighting and production design. Everyone unfortunately talks too much and other reviewers have observed how unworthy of the devotion of the sweet young heroine David Newell is. (He got his cumuppence ten years later at the hands of Bette Davis in the opening scene of 'The Letter').

David Newell has a hurdy-gurdy and balloons to sell. He guards his corner by the fountain in Paris against all comers, whether they be acrobats or Gaston Glass' dog circus, in which Thomas Jefferson plays the violin and Anita Louise dances. But Jefferson is killed, and Miss Louise is injured, so Newell allows Glass and Miss Louise to stay in his flat. He pays for her treatment, and even buys her shoes, but gruffly refuses to let Glass say he is. Instead, he quarrels with Miss Louise, even after she makes useful suggestions for his proposed show to win a scholarship.

Director Roy William Neill creates a fantasy Paris that looks like a sound version of SEVENTH HEAVEN. Miss Louise is quite enchanting, but Glass, alas, is no Charles Farrell, and Neill, although a fine worker of atmosphere is working without a script or the talent to reproduce Frank Borzage's mystical approach to love. Instead, he treads the usual romantic comedy tropes, with Yola D'Avril excellent as the other woman. The result is a good movie that fails to live up to the high standards of its first quarter hour.

British troops returning from fighting in WW1 hardly spoke of their experiences when they returned to the UK. They knew that the horrors were too much to tell mothers, wives, sisters and daughters who had led sheltered lives.

But there was another category of experiences which in contrast were very fondly remembered but were also covered by a veil of silence albeit for very different reasons. American troops post 1917, just like their British counterparts, would not have got to know much of French private domestic lives, but a great deal about the streets, the bars - and the women who frequented either or both. By 1930 when this film was made, unlike today, there would, one guesses, have been perhaps 100,000+ former soldiers with a very expert eye indeed for authenticity, even more than a tourist they had been there,seen this and done that, of French WW1 street life and the characters, men and women, to be seen. Of travelling street entertainers. Of the brassy bar singer with her sometimes sweet, sometimes fierce manner and language. Memories too of unsullied sweetness and innocence. Albeit made charming and rather sanitised.

And who, other than these ex-soldiers - and their families ("You were in France, Dear, weren't you? Was it like this?") would this lovely film have been made for? Most of the cast are French - and more French is spoken than I think any other American film before or since. It also has a French lightness, sentimentality, charm and humour - I completely mistook it for a French film, and the heart-breakingly sweet Anita Louise as being French. For soldiers who had fought in France then returned home, the film could hardly have been a more charming, delightful and evocative reminder of pleasing memories - some perhaps just like Heaven - which thereafter they had had to keep to themselves.

That generation has of course gone and it is now for a generation with no experience of this very distant place and time to be judges of its authenticity. As to its French credentials, the screen writer had written the silent movie "L'Apache" in 1919 (Maurice Chevalier had made the song "I'm an Apache" internationally famous in Ruben Mamoulian's 1932 "Love me Tonight"). Tiffany it seems were just a very busy journeyman studio (I see that "One Punch Kelly" followed in 1931). They did however do a fine job on Just Like Heaven.

Seen on Talking Pictures TV Freeview and Freesat in UK