Folies-Bergère de Paris (20th Century Pictures, United Artists, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Folies-Bergère de Paris is something else again. It was made in 1935 for Darryl F. Zanuck’s Twentieth Century Pictures just before it merged with Fox – at the time it was still an independent studio releasing through United Artists (though United Artists president Joseph Schenck decided to quit that job when the 20th Century-Fox merger went through and assume the presidency of 20th Century-Fox instead) and was the last film Chevalier made in the U.S. (Chevalier didn’t work for a U.S. studio for another 20 years due to some weird political complications; because he’d agreed during World War II to appear as an entertainer in German prisoner-of-war camps and give shows for the French prisoners, he was denounced after the war as a collabò. To get off the Left-wing blacklist in France he signed the Stockholm Peace Appeal in 1948 – and that got him blacklisted in the U.S. as Right-wingers denounced the Stockholm Peace Appeal and everyone who signed it as Communist.)

Folies-Bergère de Paris began as a play by Rudolph Lothar and Hans Adler that was adapted by Jessie Ernst, with Bess Meredyth and Hal Long credited with the actual screenplay, and it was directed in high style by the usually relatively hacky Roy Del Ruth. Its plot cast Chevalier in a double role as Baron Fernand Cassini, a super-rich financier who’s about to lose all his money because of a busted mine in Mozambique, and Eugène Charlier, a Folies-Bergère performer who impersonates him as part of the act. To keep word of the mine’s disaster from leaking out to the public while the real Baron goes to London for a loan that will keep him afloat, his business manager Morrisot (Ferdinand Munier) and his other key associates hatch a plan to hire Charlier to impersonate the Baron for the time he’s out of town, which happens to coincide with a big reception being given by the Baron at with the premier and the finance minister of the French government will be the guests of honor. Both of Chevalier’s characters have highly jealous partners: Charlier’s is his music-hall co-star Mimi (Ann Sothern, whose out-of-tune screeching on their duets quickly gets to be a trial – one’s tempted to ask, “Where was Jeanette MacDonald when Chevalier needed her?,” but the answer was, “At MGM making Naughty Marietta with Nelson Eddy and becoming a superstar”) and the Baron’s is his wife Genevieve (Merle Oberon, looking luminous as usual in a part that didn’t require much in the way of acting).

One of the conditions the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency imposed on a story like this is that the woman being romanced by one of the two men must always know which one was her real husband, and therefore which one it was licit for her to make love with – so Genevieve is briefed that her “husband” is the impostor from the music hall even though one of Charlier’s conditions for taking the job was that she not be told. There’s also a love scene in which Charlier poses as the Baron and romances Mimi, but she recognizes him from the three scratches she inflicted on the back of his hand during their last argument. Folies-Bergère de Paris is a marvelous movie even though its plot doesn’t make much sense – 20th Century-Fox remade it twice, as That Night in Rio (1941) with Don Ameche and On the Riviera (1951) with Danny Kaye, and I recall Rio as a bore and Riviera as only slightly better – mainly because of the high style with which it’s told.

As the Baron, Chevalier is made up to look surprisingly like his principal rival in the early 1930’s for the sexiest-man-in-Hollywood title, Ronald Colman, complete with “roo” moustache, and he manages to create two separate characters, believable as different people. There’s one disappointment in that there is no special-effects shot in which the two Chevaliers meet – I gather that reflects this story’s origin as a stage play, in which of course the two characters couldn’t have possibly appeared on stage simultaneously – but the roles are good for Chevalier because they give him a chance (much like his casting in Love Me Tonight as a tailor posing as an aristocrat) to contrast and play off the gap between his real working-class origins and his success at playing the upper-class boulevardier. The film also contains two absolutely stunning big production numbers by Dave Gould, one of Busby Berkeley’s most blatant imitators – he won the short-lived Academy Award for Best Dance Direction for this film, beating out Berkeley’s masterpiece, “Lullaby of Broadway,” from Gold Diggers of 1935 (though Gould went on record himself as saying Berkeley should have won). One is “Rhythm of the Rain” by Jack Stein and Jack Meskill, in which he and Ann Sothern do a vocal duet on the joys of rain while the chorines form kaleidoscope patterns with umbrellas; and the other is the big finale, “Singing a Happy Song,” in which Chevalier and the chorus pay tribute to Chevalier’s iconic straw hat. In one shot the two brims of gigantic straw hats come together on stage and look like buzz sawa about to chew Chevalier to bits.

The two big numbers were photographed by J. Peverell Marley while Barney McGill shot the rest of the movie, and in his book Behind the Camera Leonard Maltin said he spotted a major gap between the two cinematographers’ work. I don’t; the whole film is luminous and shot in rich chiaroscuro, ably demonstrating the joys of black-and-white and making you (or at least me) wonder, “Who the hell ever thought the movies needed color?” If The Way to Love seemed oddly reticent for a “pre-Code” movie, Folies-Bergère de Paris seems awfully raffish and envelope-pushing for a “post-Code” one – though the final irony of this movie’s history with the censors is that the print we were watching was from a television showing rated “TV-G.” It»s also worth noting that in a movie filmed in late 1934 and releaqsed February 22, 1935 the music is swingier and more jazzy than in Chevalier’s previous films – later in 1935 Benny Goodman would have is sudden burst of popularity that would launch the Swing Era – though Chevalier had already shown his love of jazz when inn 1930 he was asked to appear at the New York Paramount Theatre to promote his films, he was offered the choice of any band in America to accompany him, and he chose Duke Ellington. (The “suits” at Paramount tried to renege and told Chevalier, “You can’t have a white singer witn a colored band!” Chevalier replied, "Why not? In France we do it all the time!”) Folies-Bergère de Paris is a great movie and was a worthy end to Chevalier’s first Hollywood career – if it had to end, at least he ended it at the top – and, while it’s hardly on the level of Love Me Tonight (to my mind the best musical ever made, bar none), it’s stylish and well within the raffish and sexually risqué territory Chevalier’s best films inhabit.