Paris When It Sizzles

Plot

The story concerns a veteran playboy screenwriter named Richard Benson (William Holden) who has been paid to write a screenplay for his boss, Mr. Alexander Myerheim (Noël Coward). Overly set in his playboy and carousing ways, he procrastinates the writing of the screenplay until just two days before it is due. Gabrielle Simpson (Audrey Hepburn), a temp secretary hired by Benson to type the script, comes to Richard's hotel room where they are to work on the script, only then finding out about their tight deadline and that not one page or line of script had yet been written. The desperate and self-loathing writer, Richard, begins to be awakened and inspired by the beautiful Gabrielle, and starts to come up with various scenarios for his screenplay, called The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower, which is based on their unfolding romance. The screenplay, with small but inspired and comedic roles for Noël Coward, Tony Curtis, and other famous stars of the day, makes fun of the movie business, actors, studio heads and itself, and is rife with allusions to the iconic earlier roles of the two main stars.

Cast

Some members of the cast have roles in The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower, the film-within-the-film.

Production

The film, whose working title was Together in Paris, is a remake of the 1952 French film Holiday for Henrietta, directed by Julien Duvivier. Paramount exercised an option on their contracts with both Hepburn and Holden, forcing them to make the film together. Holden, who had had an affair with Hepburn during the making of Sabrina a decade earlier and been in love with her ever since, attempted without success to rekindle a romance with the now-married actress. Holden's alcoholism was also a constant challenge for Quine, who moved into a rented house next to Holden's during production to keep an eye on him. Holden later commented on both of the problems:

Curtis was brought into the production to film during a week when Holden was undergoing treatment for his alcoholism at the prompting of the director. Lang replaced Renoir as the director of photography during production, a change demanded by Hepburn after she saw what she felt were unflattering dailies.

Hepburn shot the film in the summer of 1962, back-to-back with Charade, which she shot that fall. The films shared several locations, most notably a Punch and Judy puppet theatre in the park in front of the Théâtre Marigny.

Reception

Variety called Paris When It Sizzles "marshmallow-weight hokum" and quoted a line from the film as an apt description of the film itself: "contrived, utterly preposterous and totally unmotivated"; it complimented the two leads, saying Hepburn is a "refreshingly individual creature in an era of the exaggerated curve" and Holden "handles his assignment commendably."

Time magazine said the film was "a multimillion dollar improvisation that does everything but what the title promises" and suggested that "writer George Axelrod (The Seven Year Itch) and director Richard Quine should have taken a hint from Holden['s character Richard Benson], who writes his movie, takes a long sober look at what he has wrought, and burns it."

Turner Classic Movies notes that "critics uniformly panned" the film but said it "has earned a reputation as a guilty pleasure for those who enjoy in-joke movie spoofs and an absurdist storyline played out against the glorious backdrop of the City of Light."

Film-within-the-film

Paperback Novelization

In February 1964, Dell Publishing issued a paperback novelization (with a cover price of 40¢) by then-veteran tie-in author Saul Cooper. There may have been some editorial confusion in coordinating the copyediting and design stages of the book's production, however, because the byline on the cover is "Michael Milner" (Cooper's occasional pseudonym), while on the title page, the byline is that of fictional screenwriter "Richard Benson," the story's male lead. The Benson attribution is amusingly fitting, as Cooper's novelistic approach was to narrate the story in the first person, using Benson's voice and perspective. But that's what makes it seem to be a publishing glitch that the cover byline should be yet another pseudonym, rather than a follow-through with the literary conceit.