Reason # 1 - Lousy casting. "The Last Time I Saw Paris" is an expansion of F Scott Fitzgerald's elegiac short story "Babylon Revisited," a lightly fictionalized depiction of the aftermath of Fitzgerald's marriage to Zelda. If MGM stretching a melancholy, intimate portrait of a flawed man into a feature-length romantic extravaganza was a bad idea, casting Van Johnson as the Fitzgerald character was a worse one. Charles Wills, the Fitzgerald stand-in, is a journalist who marries a beautiful but impulsive debutante in Paris right after World War II, lapses into drunken self-loathing after writing a few failed novels, and wastes his wife's inheritance on the way to becoming a puffy, alcoholic playboy. Johnson is certainly believable as a spineless gigolo, but he's too light in his loafers to play an angry husband and too light in the head to play a brilliant, tortured artist. Plus, he was in his late thirties by the time all this celluloid was wasted, so his celebrated boyish good looks were turning flabby. Thus, there's no reason Charles would attract two hot prospects like Liz Taylor and Donna Reed, the expatriate sisters who fight for the pudgy pretty boy's love in post- WWII Paris. Liz wins, of course, and while she's not bad as Wills' erratic wife Helen, she didn't have the acting chops to connect her character's wild, fountain-swimming side and hurt, vulnerable, wronged- wife side. At least she's having a lot more fun than poor Donna Reed, another beautiful actress hagged up to make Liz Taylor even prettier (I don't think Shelley Winters ever forgave George Stevens for frowzing her up in "A Place in the Sun"). The normally effervescent Miss Reed is asked to play Helen's repressed, embittered sister, and just in case she didn't get the hint that her character was emotionally distant, the studio decided to style and costume her like a constipated schoolmarm. Why MGM would waste an Oscar-winning knockout like Reed on such a drab, thankless role indicates some discombobulated priorities. Veteran actor Walter Pidgeon, as Liz and Donna's penniless bon vivant father, manages to project the necessary seedy charm, but since that's all he has to do, his near-constant presence makes him a well-manicured bore. Compounding the absurdity is Zsa Zsa Gabor, who by 1954 already looked like she'd just emerged from her seventh face-lift, wandering on screen as a wealthy socialite who has a tryst with Charles (why not just cast a drag queen - - it's Van Johnson, after all!). Van and Liz also manage to conceive a daughter, the most saccharine movie child this side of a Disney flick. The whole thing is a mess.
Reason # 2 - Profligacy. Thousands of extras wander across the MGM soundstages intended to replicate post-WWII Paris. What could have been a sad, intimate portrait of two flawed people in love becomes an overlong Technicolor extravaganza of crowd scenes, party scenes, racetrack scenes, and one Monte Carlo Grand Prix auto race just to impede character development. At one point, the MGM costume department puts Johnson in a harlequin costume. The point?
Reason # 2 - Profligacy. Thousands of extras wander across the MGM soundstages intended to replicate post-WWII Paris. What could have been a sad, intimate portrait of two flawed people in love becomes an overlong Technicolor extravaganza of crowd scenes, party scenes, racetrack scenes, and one Monte Carlo Grand Prix auto race just to impede character development. At one point, the MGM costume department puts Johnson in a harlequin costume. The point?