Week-end à Paris

Innocents In Paris is several tales interwoven of a few British subjects going over the Channel on a weekend jaunt to gay Paree. For some like stuffy British diplomat Alastair Sim it's business as he's at a European economic conference as the British delegate. Pleasure almost gets forced on him as he arranges a back channel meeting with Russian delegate Peter Illing who shows Sim the pleasures of vodka and champagne and a few other things that Paris offers. They even get a little business done.

Margaret Rutherford is just Margaret Rutherford as an eccentric painter who for a weekend does a Gene Kelly as she paints and sells her product in the streets of Montmartre.

Romance in this film is handled by young Claire Bloom who gets some heavy wooing by Claude Dauphin. That one doesn't go quite on course, still it's a once in a lifetime experience.

That and a few others make Innocents In Paris a delightful experience and a look at post World War 2 Paris. It still holds up well because the experiences are eternal.

I saw this on tv years ago but watched it today via new blu ray.

It is good fun and of interest in how it tells its story.

Even for 1953 it is cosy and unrealistic,I did not expect anything else.

But it has a lot of location filming in Paris and it looks great.

As someone obsessed with aviation history I expect they did provide meals on flights to Paris in this period.

Flying was for richer people then and this was before the jet age,the flight would have been longer than it is nowadays.

Passengers would expect food and drink on nearly all flights..

One of the reviews here made me scratch my head.

France famous for poor food produce? Really?

British airliners always crashing? Well we know about the Comet but Britain had a mighty aviation industry in the 1950s.

The French talk about the 30 glorious years of growth and prosperity after WW2.

I never found out exactly which years? 1945-1975? 1948-1978? In any case France recovered from world war 2 thanks to the Marshall plan but also to the hard work of its citizens and due to having an economic plan.

Don't look for something deep, shocking or dramatic. This is a quiet, very charming little movie, with a number of humorous, lovely scenes. It contains several slices of life from the weekends of six characters visiting Paris, each with their own goals, problems and hopes.

The visiting characters are played by outstanding British actors and actresses. There is an absolutely priceless performance by Alistair Sim as a stuffy British diplomat. Margaret Rutherford plays to perfection the ever-lovable character we know from her other stellar performances. The only problem is finding a good copy of this movie. Hopefully some studio will realize its appeal and a good DVD will appear.

Ignore the agenda-driven propaganda from other reviewers.

Unconvincing portmanteau comedy. Sim & Rutherford once again spin gold out of garbage, while the rest of the cast, notably Jimmy Edwards & Ronald Shiner, are defeated by a badly written screenplay. The Scotsman section, with James Copeland, is a good example of a poor performance meeting an inadequate script to produce unmistakable rubbish. Watching these innocents is not bliss!

This delightful and light-hearted film carries on in the tradition of gentle satire established by Mark Twain in his two popular novels 'The Innocents Abroad' and 'The Innocents at Home'. But instead of American 'innocents', this British film portrays British 'innocents', all except for a seasoned diplomat (Alastair Sim) making a first trip to Paris. The film follows the adventures of each character over the course of a weekend. They all fly out on the same plane and return on the same plane. We catch some wonderful glimpses of early performances by people who were later well known. Kenneth Williams is uncredited as someone arranging things beneath a counter in London Airport (not a window dresser, as wrongly described in IMDb), and in one fleeting cameo exchange, he manages to 'be Kenneth Williams' to an astonishing degree with just a few words. The 25 year-old Laurence Harvey, who is credited and not uncredited as claimed on IMDb, wears a tiny little moustache and is a floor waiter in a grand Paris hotel, complete with French accent. Claire Bloom plays an innocent your girl who has been 'saving up for ages' to afford her first weekend trip to Paris. She meets the romantic Claude Dauphin, and they have a weekend affair with numerous comical moments. Margaret Rutherford takes her easel and paints away in quaint streets and haunts the Louvre. She meets a British man who has lived in Paris for 30 years and has painted copies of the Mona Lisa 338 times but never sold one. She ends up being the first person to buy one, bringing ecstatic happiness to them both. There are some wonderful lines in the script. When Margaret Rutherford, who has never taken a plane before, is asked to fasten her seatbelt before takeoff, she answers innocently: 'But I haven't brought one with me.' James Copeland is excellent as a Scot in a kilt who meets a very sweet French shop girl and commences what will turn out to be a lasting romance. There are the usual jokes about his kilt, and the French women laugh at him heartily in the streets and one taunts him because she is wearing trousers and he is wearing a skirt. The film is shot on location in Paris, and it is astonishing to see how empty of traffic it was at that time. You could set up an easel in the middle of a quaint street and no car would come along and bother you for hours. Paris looks simply empty! And that can't just be because they cleared the locations for filming. From this film it is clear that it is not only the British visitors who are the 'innocents', it is the French as well, as very few of them have their own cars, and traffic is essentially nonexistent. Ronald Shiner is very amusing as a soldier who plays the drum in a military band which has travelled from Britain to play 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary', 'Colonel Bogey', and other such tunes on the occasion of the unveiling of a statue of Lord Byron. He becomes entangled with a French woman and when he discovers she has a child whom she can barely support, he gives her all his money. When he is being funny, his broad comedy technique verges on the over-obvious, but is tolerable for the character he plays. There are excellent performances from the French actresses Gaby Bruyère and Monique Gérard. There are some very fine moments in this multi-threaded film, and some genuine pathos along with all the good-natured comedy. It was written by Anatole de Grunwald, who had tremendous experience as a script writer as well as sophistication, so that the stories all work pretty well. Gordon Parry was the director, who two years before had directed TOM BROWN'S SCHOOLDAYS (1951); he died in 1961. This is a very entertaining and light-hearted film which shows a great deal of Paris as it was in 1952, and is also well worth seeing for those who are interested in the British stars of that era.