Paris Blues

I've often said that if I could go back in time it would be to the late '50s/early '60s, the Mad Men era, when Beatniks were plentiful and jazz music was at its finest and rock and roll was in its infancy. Of course, I'm a white male, so ti's easy for me to overlook certain problems with the era, such as the racism and sexism.

So I loved Paris Blues, a film from 1961 that is really, at its bare bones, a conventional dual love story, but is elevated by its setting, Paris, at a time when French directors were in the Nouvelle Vague and possibilities seemed endless.

The film, directed by Martin Ritt and written by Walter Bernstein, centers on a jazz band run by expatriate Paul Newman, who plays the trombone and is working on a composition of serious music (the score was written by Duke Ellington, no less). His close friend and saxophonist is Sidney Poitier, who left the U.S. five years earlier and has no interest in returning, as the racial tolerance in Paris is much greater than in America. Into their lives comes a pair of American tourists, small town girls. Love complicates everything.

It's a bit of a cliche that two friends would so quickly fall in love with two jazz musicians, particularly Joanne Woodward for Newman, who acts dickishly toward her. She is a single mother, and he brings out her nurturing side, but he is not one for commitment. On the other side, Diahann Carroll plays a teacher who finds Poitier's running away from America a cop out. Interestingly, she says, "Things are better than they were five years ago, and will get better next year." This, before the lunch counter sit-ins, the march to Selma, the Freedom Riders, and Bull Connor's dogs and firehoses.

The girls almost get the boys to return back with them, but I was gratified by the ending, where both musicians stay in Paris. I would have found it disingenuous for serious musicians to give up on their dreams by women they had only known for two weeks.

The mise-en-scene of Paris Blues is what makes it a movie to watch. Louis Armstrong has a cameo as a famous musician, and there's a joyous scene when he arrives at Newman's club and jams. The movie is also frank about sex and drugs. It is clear that Woodward and Newman sleep together on their first night together (nothing similar is suggested about Poitier and Carroll). There is also a subplot about a guitar player hooked on smack. That's the downside to romanticizing eras like this one, or the hippie generation of a few years later--too many drugs.

I certainly would have liked to be alive in Paris in 1961, and this film makes it seem so glorious. It is instantly nostalgic, almost like a film that would be made today about the same period.

It's interesting to note that the film was originally going to deal with interracial romance. Newman first meets Carroll, and flirts with her, but then the script partners him with Woodward, and Poitier with Carroll. Hollywood, even if it this film is more daring than most of the time period, wasn't about to go there. If the partners had been switched it would have been a very different, very daring film, but that wasn't about to happen.