This is one of those dry soap operas that were offered by small-budget studios (in this case, Pathé) since the 1910s. It's a tepid affair where the characters talk a lot about love and loss of love and running away and leaving their spouses. They have unreal expectations and reactions, ones that only existed on the stage or screen.
When Mary Hutton (Ann Harding) starts off her marriage to Jim Hutton (Fredric March) with a declaration that they, as modern, free thinking sophisticates, should allow themselves to see others, right then and there you know this little scheme is guaranteed to backfire, especially when we have seen at the wedding the couple's destined interlopers. That the groom's father has apparently pulled this open marriage stuff on his wife, leaving them unhappy, also is an early tip-off as to the events soon to unravel. Incidently, this film has only about a half minute that has anything to do with Paris.
Being produced in 1929, one expects something like a "theme song" that virtually every film had, but although the talented Josiah Zuro was the musical director, it has a spare, uninteresting track. One of the high spots of the film has Mary's paramour (Leslie Fenton) writing a ballet score, and she imagines it performed with a full cast of musicians and dancers, who glide across her room scene in ghostly double and triple exposures. Trouble is, it's lifeless and instantly forgettable. I see this was Ann Harding's film debut as well as cast member Ilka Chase. Well, everybody has to start somewhere.
Review of Paris Bound
