8pm Friday LAST TIME I SAW PARIS (1954) Romantic Drama starring Van Johnson and Elizabeth Taylor. A writer returns to Paris to gain custody of his daughter, and while there reminisces about his ill-fated marriage to the girl's mother.
Reporter Charles Wills (Van Johnson), in Paris to cover the end of World War II, falls for the beautiful Helen Ellswirth (Elizabeth Taylor) following a brief flirtation with her sister, Marion (Donna Reed). After he and Helen marry, Charles pursues his novelistic ambition while supporting his new bride with a deadening job at a newspaper wire service. But when an old investment suddenly makes the family wealthy, their marriage begins to unravel -- until a sudden tragedy changes everything.
TRIVIA
- Lester Cowan had previously tried to make this movie in the 1940s, with Cary Grant and Shirley Temple as father and daughter. He originally planned to co-produce with his partner Mary Pickford.
- Credited theatrical movie debut of Sir Roger Moore (Paul).
- The plot element of Helen Ellswirth (Dame Elizabeth Taylor) contracting pneumonia interestingly foreshadows the actress' real-life battle with the disease several years later. She always insisted it was her near-death experience and resultant tracheotomy, and not her performance that won her an Oscar for Butterfield 8 (1960).
- Loosely based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "Babylon Revisited".