Boulevards de Paris

Korean vet Gregory Fitzgerald (Steve Forrest) is headed to France to study for the priesthood along with Tony Lugacetti. On the plane, famed fashion designer Francesca (Simone Renant) is taken with Greg and gives him her address. He goes out into the Paris night and shares a cab with nightclub singer Monica Johnson (Anne Baxter). Soon, he is pulled into a murder mystery involving her.

Steve Forrest looks like an old matinee idol. He's got the chiselled jaw, the towering height, but without much charisma. He definitely isn't acting like a man of God. He's like a Jack Palance with less intensity. Anne Baxter is trying her best but her character is hopelessly lost in melodrama. As for the ending, I'm uncertain of the premise and dislike the execution. It is interesting to see 50's Paris in color and that's probably all to see in this movie.

As a golden age movie fan I was curious as soon as I saw the listing for this film. It seemed bewildering that I could be unfamiliar with an MGM film from the 50's starring Miss Anne Baxter in Technicolor, set in Paris and directed by the legendary Mitchell Leisen?

Well now I know how. What's bewildering is that a film with those advantages could turn out like this. While visually beautiful this is a flatfooted, turgidly paced suspense film missing the suspense. A very blonde Anne tries to breath life into this but she seems edgy and a bit lost. However like everybody else in this her character is poorly defined. In addition she has the titanic task of acting opposite Steve Forrest, never the most facile of actors, who is beyond wooden in the lead. In no way does he suggest any sort of spirituality or a sense of real conflict with the decisions before him.

He can be blamed somewhat for the failure of the movie but the two main culprits are the nonsensical script and Leisen. Usually able to turn out either saucy concoctions like The Mating Season, Midnight and Kitty or solid dramas along the lines of Hold Back the Dawn and Swing High, Swing Low he is off his game here on how to turn this dull lump of coal into something resembling entertainment.

The film is beautiful to look at, taking advantage of its location shooting with breathtaking views of Paris. Pretty pictures however are not enough to make an entertaining movie. The film is not painfully bad but it is a mediocre effort at best.

Actor Steve Forrest is a young good looking man named Gregory Fitzgerald who has flown to Paris France with another seminarian named Tony Lugacetti (Robert Christopher) as a stop over for a few days before starting their intense priesthood formal training. While travelling by cab to meet up with another priest for dinner a mysterious woman frantically jumps into his cab and begs Gregory to allow her to share his cab with her to escape someone who is chasing her. The young seminarian Gregory is intrigued but more earnestly just wants to help this pretty damsel whose distress is visible all over her worried face and in her nervous mannerisms.

Gradually we find out that the woman in distress is a cabaret singer named Monica Johnson (Anne Baxter) and she is trying to flee the country to avoid being murdered herself by a very wealthy and prominent French tycoon.

Other reviewers have said there was no chemistry between actors Steve Forrest and Anne Baxter but you have to appreciate that Steve Forrest was playing a seminarian who pledges himself to God and to refuse any sexual offers of any kind even if it means saying no to the sultry blonde and vivacious Anne Baxter.

As this mystery unfolds most men and women would be disappointed with the ending which I will not spoil for those still interested in seeing it for themselves. Suffice to say I thoroughly enjoyed this suspense/thriller/mystery and I also felt that both Steve Forrest and Anne Baxter were exceptional in their respective roles.

I give Bedevilled an excellent 8 out of 10 IMDB rating.

The suspense in Bedevilled turns out to be whether Steve Forrest will break the vow of celibacy he hasn't yet taken. (Maybe he was following in the footsteps of his brother Dana Andrews, who played a priest in Edge of Doom.) As an American off to Rome to study for Holy Orders, Forrest gets three days to kill in Paris. When his buddy Robert Christopher, nauseous after their bumpy transatlantic flight, takes to bed, Forrest decides to explore the city on his own. But, like nuns, those seminarians travel in pairs for good reason: They might run smack into Anne Baxter.

Forrest's attempts at cool politeness seem wasted on the mercurial Baxter, who either clings to him for comfort or tells him to clear out of her life ('I don't know you from AC/DC,' she snaps at one point). When the police show up at the Elephant Blanc, a cabaret where she sings, she names Forrest as her alibi for the past several hours, even though they've just met. She tells him she just witnessed a murder and may soon wind up a victim herself. When some thugs start following her, Forrest helps her hide out until she can flee the country (no easy task, since her passport has been stolen).

Meanwhile, Forrest is seriously A.W.O.L. from his vocation. When Christopher, hunting the fleshpots of Paris, locates him in a garret in the slums, he offers his help. But Forrest, operating under the constraints of Hollywood's thick-headed male code, rebuffs him. He rebuffs Baxter, too, whose feelings for him have started to stir. (Why won't he tell her of his vocation? Is he ashamed?) Finally, after a chase over rooftops and up and down countless steps, Baxter and Forrest take refuge in a church. There, humbled in the presence of the Absolute, she starts to reveal a little more of her story....

If there was a good way out of the plot she welded together, scriptwriter Jo Eisinger didn't find it. (Her career started strongly, with benchmark noirs like Gilda and Night and the City, but petered out into the sentimental and far-fetched - The System, Crime of Passion.) The suspense mechanisms of Baxter's plight stay sketched in only roughly, while Forrest's drab dilemma (theology versus biology) takes top priority; that a woman's life is at stake seems less momentous than whether he might succumb to temptation. The ending satisfactorily resolves neither character's problem. Bedevilled closes on a chord of attempted uplift that strikes a gratingly sour note.

It seems that Mitchell Leisen was in love with France and Paris and the results were often excellent ("arise ,my love" "midnight" ).In other movies he displays the same Francophilia ,even if the stories do not take place there :"Frenchman's creek " , "Hold back the dawn" .

"Bedevilled" (the ludicrous French title is "Boulevard De Paris"!),sadly is not in the same league as the works I mention above. He couldn't capture the Parisian zeitgeist and the chemistry between Ann Baxter and Steve Forrest is nonexistent.It takes a lot of imagination to believe that they are eaten with desire and that the would be future priest has to fight to stay chaste .The story is muddled and worthless ,the kind of story an average viewer has been told and told and told.

For the French audience ,there are some of our actors: Victor Francen as a priest was already used by Leisen in "hold back the dawn"(he reads the famous lines of the statue of liberty,a gift from France to the USA!) ;Simone Renant as an ambiguous clothes designer and fashion businesswoman Forrest meets on the plane ;Maurice Teynac is the villain and Raymond Bussières the concierge.

Leisen's wit and his good sense of humor have metamorphosed into an annoying and very unsatisfying lack of weight or consequence and into what we have got to call bigotry.