Barnes & Noble

A pungent satire of Hollywood screenwriting conventions, Richard Quine's movie of George Axelrod's ace script, Paris, is a neurotic tonic. William Holden and Audrey Hepburn play, respectively, Richard Benson, a blocked, aging playboy screenwriter, and Gabrielle Simpson, a slumming expat stenographer, who have two days to spitball a script called "The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower." They spend that time imagining each scene, eliciting an automatic filmic rendering of their words. Benson says, "We can get Sinatra!" and suddenly The Voice himself swingingly bellows the title. Axelrod's penchant for weird, self-reflexive lunacy -- a trait also running through his scripts for The Manchurian Candidate and Lord Love a Duck -- throws the movie into overdrive early. Yet the brainy sifting through a Chinese box-style film within a film within a film is kept well modulated by Quine. Paris never manages to exhaust its subjects, which include the sexual subtexts in spy and horror flicks, beatnik Method actors (one played here by a fey Tony Curtis), writerly paranoia, meet-cute scenes, and urbane decadence. This tart, tangy champagne hasn't lost any of its bubbles.

All Movie Guide

Richard Quine directs George Axelrod's acerbic script (adapted from Julien Duvivier's La Fête à Henriette) in this romantic comedy that reunites William Holden and Audrey Hepburn for the first time since 1954's Sabrina. Holden plays Richard Benson, a Hollywood screenwriter being pressured by movie producer Alexander Meyerheimer ({|Noël Coward|}) to finish his script entitled "The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower." Meyerheimer gives Richard a two-day ultimatum to complete his work, unaware that Richard has yet to even start on the script. In an effort to get moving on his project, Richard hires a live-in secretary, Gabrielle Simpson (Audrey Hepburn), to help him. Soon enough, the two fall in love and spend the time enacting various scenes from the unwritten screenplay as the time slips away and Richard's deadline looms. Paul Brenner

Product Details

• UPC: 097360631449
• Source: PARAMOUNT
• Region Code: 1
• Presentation: Wide Screen
• Sound: Dolby Digital, monaural
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English
• Time: 1:50:00
• Sales Rank: 8,406

This DVD is also available as part of a box set:

• Audrey Hepburn Collection

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