| Innocents in Paris | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Directed by | Gordon Parry |
| Screenplay by | Anatole de Grunwald |
| Produced by | Anatole de Grunwald John Woolf |
| Starring | Alastair Sim Ronald Shiner Claire Bloom Margaret Rutherford Claude Dauphin Jimmy Edwards |
| Cinematography | Gordon Lang |
| Edited by | Geoffrey Foot |
| Music by | Joseph Kosma |
Production company | |
Release date |
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Running time | 102 min |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | £161,462[1] |
Innocents in Paris is a 1953 British-Frenchinternational co-productioncomedy film produced byRomulus Films, directed byGordon Parry and starringAlastair Sim,Ronald Shiner,Claire Bloom,Margaret Rutherford,Claude Dauphin, andJimmy Edwards, and also featuringJames Copeland.[2] Popular French comedy actorLouis de Funès appears as a taxi driver, and there are cameo appearances byChristopher Lee,Laurence Harvey andKenneth Williams. The writer and producer wasAnatole de Grunwald, born in Russia in 1910, who fled to Britain with his parents in 1917. He had a long career there as a writer and producer, including the filmsThe Way to the Stars,The Winslow Boy,Doctor's Dilemma,Libel, andThe Yellow Rolls-Royce.[3]
The film is a romantic comedy about a group of Britons flying out fromThe London Airport for a weekend in Paris in 1953 in aBritish European AirwaysAirspeed Ambassador. An English diplomat (Sim) is on a working trip to obtain an agreement with his Russian counterpart (Illing); aRoyal Marinebandsman (Shiner) has a night out on the tiles after winning a pool of the French currency held by all the Marines in his band; a young woman (Bloom) finds romance with an older Frenchman (Dauphin) who gives her a tour of Paris; an amateur artist (Rutherford) searches out fellow painters on theLeft Bank and in theLouvre; a hearty Englishman (Edwards) spends the entire weekend in an English-style pub; and aBattle of Normandy veteran (Copeland) is an archetypal Scotsman inkilt andTam o' Shanter who finds love with a young French woman (Gérard).
The film displays the mores and manners of the British, and, to a lesser extent, the French, in the early nineteen-fifties. At this time,Britons were allowed to take only £25 out of the country,[4] as £5 British cash andtraveller's cheques, and there are several scenes showing how the travellers dealt with this. The film also features a Russian nightclub (of which there were several in Paris at the time), with Ludmila Lopato, a Russiantziganechanteuse, singing the original Russian version of the song that became "Those were the Days", which became a hit record forMary Hopkin.