Snoozy melodrama has two redeeming values -- The director repeatedly found a way to show Elizabeth Taylor barely dressed. Liz in full Technicolor negligees is probably worth 5 stars all on its own, frankly. At one point she looks in a full-length mirror and moans, ''I'll never be a size 10 again.'' Sadly, she was right. There's a bonus for fans of Young Frankenstein. About half way through The Last Time I Slept In Paris, who shows up but Eva Gabor with her turned-up nose, breathy lisp and - yes, after she changes for dinner - a blue taffeta dress. RIP Madeleine Kahn. Problem is shortly thereafter Liz and the inexplicably popular Van Johnson discover they're rich thanks to some oil wells and -- Liz hacks off her beautiful hair to resemble pixie Shirley MacLaine. Not that there's anything wrong with that when you're Shirley MacLaine, but why would Liz Taylor do so? So the producers could show the passage of time? Bad idea. Hack Van Johnson - filthy rich and married to Elixabeth Taylor - whines b/c publishers hate his writing. What an insufferable loser. Watch for Liz tearing a sheet of paper from Van's typewriter and seeing the nonsense he's written - shades of Jacko in The Shining. And lastly - holy smokes - Roger Moore was ridiculously good looking. Van Johnson might as well have just walked off the movie set right then and there.

I was around at that time. How did I ever miss this movie? I say those who allege they don't like it understand little. Now that YouTube is around, I keep noticing that when we saw movies at that time in the palace type movie theaters, we also saw little. But now, for the first time, I know that those who rave about the beauty of Elizabeth Taylor were the ones in Hollywood who saw her face to face. Now, the script for this movie was marvelously superb, and Van Johnson was a born top notch actor. Where were the Academy Award nominations for this movie that year? Even Donna Reed, always usually playing squeaky clean, had the chance for a real in depth, dramatic role. We also shouldn't forget the role played by Sandy Descher, then eight years of age, who was already taking ballet lessons, inspired in real life by the motion picture The Red Shoes, so that her first name in this movie was indeed Vicki, evidently from the name Victoria Page. So, all in all, ten stars for this movie? Yes.

If you've been reading my reviews under my username for the last several weeks, you probably know that I've been commenting on various previous films of the cast of the original "Dallas" in chronological order during that time. So it is here that I finally watched this long-in-public-domain M-G-M feature that starred Van Johnson and Elizabeth Taylor with Donna Reed-the second Miss Ellie on that soap-among the supporting cast. In another coincidence that I appreciated while watching, there was a scene where the father of Donna and Elizabeth mentioned investing in some oil wells from Texas that turned out to be useless but later on became the opposite. And it was Ms. Reed's character who made the "useless" statement! Otherwise, I liked this drama about Johnson and Ms. Taylor's romance and later marriage that threatened to fall into the rocks when they both take possible paramours in Eva Gabor and Roger Moore, respectively. As for Ms. Reed, she doesn't seem much use as Ms. Taylor's sister until her climatic scene with Van Johnson near the end concerning his daughter. Sure, there may not be such a good reason for the ending to occur considering the way certain characters behaved but if one is willing to believe in Second Chances, then this one surely deserved them! So, yeah, that's a recommendation of The Last Time I Saw Paris.

Here's the thing. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940. He published his first novel in 1920 and his last in 1934. In the twenties and early thirties he turned out some fifty or so short stories for which, initially, he earned top dollar but when his wife, Zelda, was diagnosed as schizophrenic and hospitalized he turned to the bottle and apart from a series of pot-boilers about a Hollywood hack named Pat Hobby and a series of essays, The Crack-Up, published in Esquire magazine around 1936, he produced little of any merit, albeit he was working on a novel when he died. He owed his success, particularly where short stories were concerned, to his gift of both understanding and interpreting the 'voice' of young people in the 'Jazz' Age. Bablyon Revisited is one such story dating from his peak years so the minute MGM chose to 'update' it to some thirteen or fourteen years AFTER his death its uniqueness i.e. the 'voice' of the Jazz Age, was totally destroyed. Even the central sequence, a flashback that begins in 1945 can't do much to help as that was still five years after Fitzgerald died. That being said it is, of course quite possible that movie buffs who couldn't care less about Fitzgerald would have checked this out on the strength of Elizabeth Taylor - who had grown up at MGM - Van Johnson, who had starred in several big-budget MGM movies in the forties and Walter Pigeon, who had likewise appeared in some top grossing MGM fodder (and had, ironically, just appeared in The Bad And The Beautiful, also from MGM which lifted a few rocks in the tide-pool that is Hollywood to reveal the unsavory marine life scrabbling around there). These people may well have come away content and serenely oblivious to Fitzgerald's ending, diametrically opposed to the one on offer here. The bad news is that even as I write the semi-amateur Baz Luhrman has got his claws into The Great Gatsby and is no doubt even now attempting to outdo the joke he entitled Moulin Rouge.