To Paris with Love ** (1955, Alec Guinness, Odile Versois, Vernon Gray, Elina Labourdette, Jacques François, Austin Trevor) – Classic Movie Review 7753

Director Robert Hamer’s 1954 British comedy drama To Paris with Love stars Alec Guinness as the ageing, greying British widower Colonel Sir Edgar Fraser who takes his grown-up son John Fraser (Vernon Gray) off to France, where of course they know more about the facts of life, and once there each schemes to marry the other off.

Guinness is entertaining in this otherwise routine, virtually charmless romantic comedy. He had previously worked with director Hamer to much greater effect in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and Father Brown (1954).

Reginald H Wyer’s muddy-looking Technicolor colour images, the ropey back-projections filmed at Pinewood Studios, Robert Buckner’s stodgy screenplay from Sterling Noel’s story, and Gray’s stiff, wooden performance are the main problems of a shaky, way too-mild film. The star, character actors and the decent plot set-up are the saving graces. It could have been a contender but the good stuff gets lost in the execution.

Also in the cast are Odile Versois, Elina Labourdette, Jacques François, Austin Trevor, Jacques B Brunius, Claude Romain, Maureen Davis, Mollie Hartley Milburn, Michael Anthony, Pamela Stirling, Claude Collier, Nicholas Bruce, Jacques Sey, Toni Frost and André Mikhelson.

Hamer is also director of the classics Pink String and Sealing Wax and It Always Rains on Sunday and has to be judged by his own highest standards.

Canada born Vernon Gray (26 March 1928) made only half a dozen films.

You’d think they would have hired John Fraser to play John Fraser, but they didn’t. The real John Fraser did get to act with Guinness, though, in Tunes of Glory.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7753

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