There's lots of low budget fun to be had -and plenty of pulchritude, too- in Alfred E. Green's Paris MODEL, some of which (Marilyn Maxwell's episode) predicts the following year's WOMAN'S WORLD. Despite the "suggestive" title, forty-something Paulette Goddard plays a secretary on the make for her absent-minded (and married) boss (Leif Ericson, Frances Farmer's ex) in her episode and doesn't get him ...which fits because although she's still an attractive woman, she's no Monroe and her "saucy minx" act was wearing a little thin at this point.
The film itself is a rather racy four-part TALES OF MANHATTAN-esque "confection" about three gold diggers (Goddard, Maxwell, Eva Gabor) and one good girl (Barbara Lawrence) who don "Nude At Midnight", a Parisian couture creation that soon gets knocked off by Mason's (read Macy's) department store before working its way down to a thrift shop. The episodic film follows each of the gown-wearing gals for a night out but the pesky Production Code demanded a comeuppance for the three forward thinking (aka "dangerous") women. Oh, what a scintillating thinker like Ernest Lubitsch could have done with this kind of material back in Pre-Code days (interestingly enough, director Green helmed Barbara Stanwyck's BABY FACE back in '33).
Each of the episodes are connected by in-jokes but one of them was a real head-scratcher: Goddard goes to Mason's and tells a clerk she wants "a Marilyn Maxwell dress, you know, something sexy and curvy" but would the sales girl even know who in the hell she was talking about? Marilyn Maxwell was no MM if you know what I mean and wasn't all that big, even in 1953. I mostly remember her as Rock Hudson's perennial "beard".
Eva Gabor steals the show as a Continental DuBarry and her in-joke was vamping Tom Conway (as a maharajah in a turban with a big jewel on it), who's brother George Sanders was married to Eva's sister Zsa Zsa at the time. Cecil Kellaway plays a lecherous (what else) bed manufacturer in the Maxwell episode and restaurateur Prince Michael Romanoff's the special guest star as Barbara Lawrence's fairy godfather.
This story reminded me of Cornell Woolrich's "I'm Dangerous Tonight", his supernatural novella about a gown fashioned from an Aztec ceremonial cloak which makes its wearers murderous. As much as I liked the movie, this plot would have been even more fun.
The film itself is a rather racy four-part TALES OF MANHATTAN-esque "confection" about three gold diggers (Goddard, Maxwell, Eva Gabor) and one good girl (Barbara Lawrence) who don "Nude At Midnight", a Parisian couture creation that soon gets knocked off by Mason's (read Macy's) department store before working its way down to a thrift shop. The episodic film follows each of the gown-wearing gals for a night out but the pesky Production Code demanded a comeuppance for the three forward thinking (aka "dangerous") women. Oh, what a scintillating thinker like Ernest Lubitsch could have done with this kind of material back in Pre-Code days (interestingly enough, director Green helmed Barbara Stanwyck's BABY FACE back in '33).
Each of the episodes are connected by in-jokes but one of them was a real head-scratcher: Goddard goes to Mason's and tells a clerk she wants "a Marilyn Maxwell dress, you know, something sexy and curvy" but would the sales girl even know who in the hell she was talking about? Marilyn Maxwell was no MM if you know what I mean and wasn't all that big, even in 1953. I mostly remember her as Rock Hudson's perennial "beard".
Eva Gabor steals the show as a Continental DuBarry and her in-joke was vamping Tom Conway (as a maharajah in a turban with a big jewel on it), who's brother George Sanders was married to Eva's sister Zsa Zsa at the time. Cecil Kellaway plays a lecherous (what else) bed manufacturer in the Maxwell episode and restaurateur Prince Michael Romanoff's the special guest star as Barbara Lawrence's fairy godfather.
This story reminded me of Cornell Woolrich's "I'm Dangerous Tonight", his supernatural novella about a gown fashioned from an Aztec ceremonial cloak which makes its wearers murderous. As much as I liked the movie, this plot would have been even more fun.