The final example is from the movie An American in Paris that was made in 1951 - by which time something new had clearly been added.
While Casablanca's image of Paris also had its fair share of clichés - the wind in Ingrid Bergman's hair down the Champs Elysees, the river boat waiter with his striped sweater and beret, the statuette of the Eiffel Tower on the bar in Bogart's restaurant - the road scenes are indubitably fairly matter of fact. The images say: This is a road in Paris, it's a petite foreign and may look somewhat different from your local main road in Dayton, Ohio, or Peru, Indiana, but that's all there is to say about it. Nowhere is it implied that this road was best than a road anywhere else in the world.
But this is exactly what the road scene in An American in Paris tells us.
Almost the first thing we learn about Paris - which is introduced by a kaleidoscope of her main sights, accompanied by jaunty music and a Gene Kelly voice over - is that it is "a Mecca for the arts". It is magnificent, inspiring, beautiful - and that is only the beginning.
As we learn on our petite tour of Kelly's residential quarter, it is also "urban" in the best sense of the word, a place where different elements meet and merge into a symphony of diversity, like different colors on a canvas: the young join in their passionate embrace and the minister on his bicycle, the road cleaner and the bourgeois, the nuns and the kids, the tailor's atelier and the book shop. It is also the place of a prosperous and well-functioning community. Every person is friends with Every person else, just like Gene Kelly is friends with the road urchins who are waving to him from the pavement.
Everything, in one word, is the negative mirror image of suburban America where you are only ever likely to meet somebody who is a lot like yourself.
Finally, to top it all, watch the scene where the music hall singer enters the bar. Every person is happy to see him, loud voices are being raised: "Come and see who's here!" This is clearly more Italy than France. Not that such a scene would be any more likely to occur in Rome than in Paris or anywhere else, but this is not an issue of reality but one of cinematic cliché: the mom coming level from the kitchen, wiping her hand on the apron, the embrace - that is Sophia Loren, not Brigitte Bardot. But this has ceased to matter. This is a Paris of the mind, a fantasy, a mythical place that appears to stand in for all that America never had or once may have had only to lose it on its way. A place into which Americans project their group longings.
By this time, Hollywood had clearly lost its valuable bearings for its beloved, and more such Parisian love stories were to follow throughout the 1950s. After An American in Paris, Sabrina was shot in 1954, Funny Face in 1955 and Gigi in 1958.
These four films - not the only, but the most leading Hollywood movies of the period that were set in Paris - tell essentially the same story. The protagonist is all the time a young someone who is taken out of his or her normal context - American or, in the case of Gigi, domestic - and travels to Paris ("society Paris" for Gigi) where he or she acquires sophistication and finds romance, in this order, not, however, as a consequence of it. This is an leading point: the real fancy why the protagonists find love and romance is all the time the lucidity of their hearts
Have you recognized the plot? You will have if you are customary with the principles agreeing to which all stories reflect one of a obvious estimate of narrative archetypes. Because this is, in essence, the story of Cinderella, of "virtue rewarded".
Now, all theories and all points can be overstretched to the point of caricature, and neither this principles nor this point are an exception. Nevertheless, it appears that America, the virtuous ingénue, has met the world, played in this Hollywood movie by Paris, fallen in love and "tied the knot" - to live happily ever after.
Only, of course, that she would not. But that is a story for other article.
Hollywood's Long-Running Love Affair With Paris - Part Iii: An American In Paris With Gene Kelly Interested This:
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