Slightly French

It begins like Detlef Sierck's "das Hofkonzert.";in both movies ,the star is no longer available and they need a replacement ;music and dance make almost 50% of the movie in both although the German one was operetta .There the comparison ends.

It's a carnival dancer ,a would be folies bergères ex-artist who will play the part ; then the script turns Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" : her manners are not adequate , her grammar is worse ,so he asks a teacher to use phonetics to make a duchess out of the Flower Girl. Dancing ,singing and glamour are no problem for Miss Lamour , who even tries to live up to her so called reputation by learning a little bit of French (one can hear her utter "n'est-ce pas? " (in French,there's no problem with don't it ?and doesn't it ?,for it translates everything) ,"bonjour monsieur" ;hence the title .

But wouldn't Mary O'Leary lose her whole identity in the process when she became Rochelle Olivia ? And eventually won't his creator(Don amèche) be caught out at his own game ?

As it often happens in Douglas Sirk's imitation of life, reality and performances (the row between the director and his star) are difficult to distinguish;in his book , "exquisite ironies and magnificent obsessions ", Tom Ryan points out that his happy endings are often ironical and double-entendre.

To totally disagree with the previous reviewers, I think that this, together with all other early Sirk movies I've seen, is nothing short of staggering. Filled with one-liners worthy of a Howard Hawks/Ben Hecht movie, it's not only early evidence of Sirk's genius for space and light and shadow, but also a highly sophisticated and perverse rendition of the Pygmalion theme. It's a measure of Sirk's genius that the characters, though formulaic, spring to life as in a Greek tragedy - or a Raoul Walsh, CB de Mille etc. movie- through the sheer strength of stereotype. Here, as elsewhere, Sirk is a bit like Frank Sinatra: cool and detached on surface, but revealing underneath the filth and the fury ;> I saw it today (6APR07) at the Film Forum NYC and it blew me away. Someone release it in DVD fast, it's an (to my knowledge) unsung masterpiece.

SLIGHTLY FRENCH is a delightful little trifle starring Dorothy Lamour as a cynical carnival performer who is wooed by movie director Don Ameche to star in his new movie and feign being a great French star imported to America for the film. (Interestingly, this very plot was used that same year in IT'S A GREAT FEELING with Doris Day - and Day's Faux French femme's last name was Lamour!!!). Elegantly filmed by cultish director Douglas Sirk, SLIGHTLY FRENCH is not a classic but it's a very appealing little comedy/musical/drama with two excellent stars. Cannot believe one reviewer on IMDb wrote Lamour "never became a movie star" away from Hope and Crosby, she was only one of the biggest stars 1936-1949 in pictures and in 1941 was VARIETY magazine's top female box-office attraction. She starred in many excellent films sans Bob or Bing, THE HURRICANE, THE FLEET'S IN, JOHNNY APOLLO, SPAWN OF THE NORTH, etc. You'll note she gets billing over Ameche in this film. Alas, few of the big movie stars of the era have had their careers locked away in the vaults as Dorothy has - most of her films were at Paramount, and Universal (which now owns the 1930-1948 Paramount films) has done a very poor job getting most of them in circulation so most do only know her today from the Road movies. She was a great singer, a delightful screen star, and a fairly good actress too. Here's hoping this Columbia release will show up on Turner Classic Movies soon so more can see this lovely glamour girl in this underrated gem.

This is a remake of Lowe, Sothern starrer Let's fall in love (1933), which itself is one of many adaptations of Shaw's Pygmalion. Agreed that Shaw too had been influenced by, but that was minimal, from the original mythical story of the same name, unlike these, and many other set of movies. A perfectionist Director Ameche (Lowe) - need an European actress French (Swedish) when the star is indisposed (walks out) due to his tough attitude walks out. Trying to get away from it all, he visits a carnival, and finds a girl, who fits the bill - only then he finds she is a full blooded American, nothing French (Swedish) about her. He puts her under Language and Culture training and then springs the surprise on the unsuspecting studio, and public - who laps her up. By the time the cat is out of the bag, the movie has progressed too far to call it a day. In addition the financiers are elated, the lie exposed to/by the press had been a free publicity for heroine and movie. But by then the director is fired and with her love out of studio, heroine sulks (disappears). Within ( ) is the 1933 movie.

Though it was pre-Maisie - but the role was almost similar to the Maisie roles Sothern was to play later - and she fitted perfectly in it. And despite being partial to Ameche, I found Lowe much more convincing. The tough ruthless slave-driver might not have been Ameche's cup of tea.

But the main fault in this version wasn't actors. Lamour wasn't too far behind Sothern in that department, at least in this movie. It was in conceptualization/ direction. The clamour for Swedish actress was understood (Garbo was the Queen then - and with her neighbor, Dietrich etc, one could justify the attraction of Swedish Miss'. But in this era - Bardot or her neighbors, Loren, Gina etc were yet to be born (on screen) - in fact another lovely Swede, Bergman was still reigning - though about to go Italian. In addition to these, critical factors, which was necessary for the movie, there were quite a few other unconvincing episodes (e.g. Lamour's first meeting with the producer (Willard Parker). She had been trained to be french, she knows why, so she simply won't be acting American, while interacting with an unknown person, that too at home.

My recommendation is to watch the far superior 1933 movie.

Don Ameche seemed to get typecast as a lying flop in his movies, whether it was as an unsuccessful success coach who lies to his pupil in The Magnificent Dope, a newspaper man who has to rent a wife to impress his family oriented boss in Guest Wife, or a press agent who passes a carnival dancer off as a French actress so he doesn't lose his job at the studio in Slightly French. Maybe he owes it all to playing Stephen Foster, who was notoriously unsuccessful until his death.

You can find some laughs in this movie, especially if you're a Dorothy Lamour fan. Adele Jergens has a small part in the beginning as a French diva who walks off the set in the middle of a big production number. Desperate to replace her with another French actress, director Willard Parker and press agent Don Ameche go on a hunt. Don finds the versatile Dorothy working different jobs at a carnival and pulls a "Henry Higgins" by giving her a crash course in French high society.

For me, the movie became pretty irritating after a while. Dorothy gets a crush on Don while he's Eliza Doolittle-ing her, but you don't really understand why since he's always yelling at her and criticizing her. Instead of letting him know how much he's hurt her feelings, she yells right back. With the constant bickering and dysfunctional relationship, it gives you very little to root for.