Slightly French
                    
Director: Douglas Sirk
Year: 1949
Rating: 6.0
About five minutes into this I began to suspect that I had seen it before - recently - with my memory that was quite possible but then it hit me - yes, I had seen it, sort of. This was a remake of the Ann Sothern 1933 film Let's Fall in Love where she has to pretend to be Swedish in order to act in a film. Much of this film follows that one though with a few changes. For one thing, Sothern is replaced by Dorothy Lamour and you can't complain about that - and fortunately Edmund Lowe is replaced by Don Ameche which is a big improvement - at least Ameche is age appropriate to Lamour while Lowe was decades older than Sothern.  The mood shifts as well from comedy to romance and Lamour's eyes are irresistibly romantic. Used to great effect here.



The director of this is the great Douglas Sirk - but certainly not considered great at this point. He had left Germany because of his Jewish wife in 1937 and been mildly successful with Columbia Studio. It wasn't until the mid-fifties that he started directing the films for which he is famous for today. Technicolor helped him and color would have given this film a bit more gloss than it has.



Ameche is directing a musical and he is making the French actress (Adele Jergens) do take after take on a musical dance number - to the point where she quits. And he is fired. He is an obsessive director demanding everything be perfect. He and his sister (Janis Carter) visit a carnival where he sees one woman in a Cockney act, then in a Brazilian one and finally a French one. This is Lamour. He sees possibilities here and convinces her to pretend to be French after much tutoring (Jeanne Manet) until she is ready to pull off the deal. In Let's Fall in Love, Sothern sang in Swedish and spoke it - Lamour does not try the same in French. It goes pretty much where you expect it to - it goes down easily enough but leaves no desire to have had it go longer. 80-minutes was plenty. A few songs from Lamour in that deep sultry voice of hers is a treat.