Femmes de Paris (1953)
Directed by Jean Boyer

Film Review

Jean Boyer directed a fair number of turkeys in the course of his insanely prolific filmmaking career but few are as well stuffed and tasteless as this facile comedy extravaganza.  On the thinnest of pretexts (this one is of truly homeopathic proportions), the world's leading astronomer - Michel Simon - is roped into visiting a Parisian nightclub, where (surprise, surprise) he discovers a universe he never existed, one where semi-naked women perform exotic dances and second rate comedians try to be funny and fail spectacularly.  Femmes de Paris is the silliest and most vacuous of Boyer's films, and whilst it tries hard to be entertaining it fails dismally as the quality of the contributions from the supposed star performers is way below par (even Robert Lamoureux fails to get more than a grudging titter and merely ends up looking like an irritating fool).

The plot, not that you can detect it without the aid of a very powerful electron microscope, was apparently dreamed up by Ray Ventura, who should really have stuck to his day job as a musician because all that he and fellow scribe Alex Joffé deliver is a tedious run-around in which the talents of leads Michel Simon and Brigitte Auber are totally wasted.  Just what induced performers of the calibre of Danièle Delorme, Sophie Desmarets and Germaine Kerjean to get mixed up in this pointless farrago is anyone's guess - perhaps they just wanted a night out with the stars (they'd have been better off peering through Simon's telescope).  If you watch very carefully you may just catch a glimpse of twenty year-old Sacha Distel, in his first screen appearance - thankfully he was uncredited so the film didn't do his career any lasting damage.  Simon and Boyer had achevied great things together on their earlier comedies Circonstances atténuantes (1939) and Noix de coco (1939), but here they are just squandering their talents on the most puerile of timewasters.

Film Synopsis

Charles Buisson, a Nobel Prize winning professor of astronomy, is delighted when, one evening, he observes a new supernova through his telescope.  He cannot wait to notify others in his field of his exciting discovery, and promptly does so by telephone.  He is then surprised when he receives a phone call from a clearly distressed woman who threatens to kill herself at a Parisian nightclub called Le Ruban Bleu unless he comes to her aid.  Reluctantly, the professor allows his humanitarian feelings to overcome his professional duties, so he heads off to the swanky nightclub to look for the mysterious woman.   What he discovers is a whole new world he never knew existed, but no one seems to be remotely concerned with his increasingly desperate efforts to find the distressed woman...