Innocents in Paris

1953

Action / Adventure / Comedy / Drama

Plot summary


Uploaded by: FREEMAN

Director

Top cast

Christopher Lee Photo
Christopher Lee as Lieutenant Whitlock
Claire Bloom Photo
Claire Bloom as Susan Robbins
Louis de Funès Photo
Louis de Funès as Monsieur Celestin
Laurence Harvey Photo
Laurence Harvey as François
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
828.64 MB
986*720
English 2.0
NR
24 fps
1 hr 30 min
P/S 4 / 1
1.5 GB
1480*1080
English 2.0
NR
24 fps
1 hr 30 min
P/S 0 / 6

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by nicholas.rhodes8 / 10

A little gem from the fifties - for nostalgia buffs and golden age of Paris

This film is now (October 2007) available in DVD from SPAIN from online stores such as DVDGO under the title Inocentes en Paris with English and Spanish language tracks and optional Spanish subtitles. Why it should be available in that country and not in the UK is a total mystery to me !

In the early 1950's a motley group of English tourists fly off to visit Paris for a weekend. The film retraces what happens to each of them during their short stay in Paris. The film includes well-known English and French actors at the time, such as Alastair Sim, Jimmy Edwards, Louis de Funès, Claude Dauphin, Claire Bloom, Gaby Bruyère etc.

It's a chance to see Paris during its "golden age" the 1950's ( so different from nowadays ! ). Parts of the film are very romantic and touching, notably the "idylles" between the young scotsman and Raymonde, Gaby Bruyère and Dicky Bird, Claire Bloom and Claude Dauphin. There are also very funny moments, notably with Alastair Sim as the international negotiator trying to reach agreement with his Russian counterpart by making him sign on a table cloth.........and Margaret Rutherford and her Mona Lisa......... !!!

The film is a pure piece of anthology of the fifties, and I would dearly recommend it to all, like me, who hanker after films of this era. It has undeniable charm and such a film could not be made nowadays as everything including Paris has become so much more cosmopolitan. The quintessentially French atmosphere of Paris at the time is preserved for posterity on this film as in reality it exists no more. We see larger-than-life characters from Paris, such as the huge butcher, the concierge etc.

I especially loved De Funès as the taxi driver - one of the rare times this actor has appeared in a British Film.

Reviewed by bkoganbing6 / 10

Paris takes the British

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.

Reviewed by robert-temple-17 / 10

Paris with barely any traffic but plenty of Amour

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.

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