In partnership with The Film Foundation, iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese's exclusive monthly contribution to the TCM newsletter Now Playing in April 2022.
There are certain cities that have become vivid presences in movies, so vivid that they are somewhat like mysterious omnipresent characters.
San Francisco comes immediately to mind—the vistas, the heights, the moisture in the air that diffuses the light, the architecture. There’s my home town, New York—more angular, restless, unsettled. And of course, there’s Paris. What is it about Paris? First of all, there’s the size. As Jacques Prévert wrote, “Paris est tout petit” – Paris is very small. Its highest landmarks are visible everywhere, and it’s very difficult to get lost. There’s also a great visual uniformity—the old stone buildings with the great wooden doors, the tiny streets, the hills, the banks of the Seine and its many bridges, the storefronts. There’s a long and rich history of Parisian painting and photography. There’s a poetic and romantic aura around the city and its history, which you feel everywhere you go. And finally, there’s the fact that the city has been filmed and/or lovingly re-created by a very long list of great filmmakers.
There are 24 titles in TCM’s weekend-long tribute, including titles by Charlie Chaplin (A Woman of Paris), René Clair (Under the Roofs of Paris), Ernst Lubitsch working from a Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder script (Ninotchka), Wilder himself (Love in the Afternoon), Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le flambeur, which will be shown twice), Stanley Donen (Funny Face), Vincente Minnelli (An American in Paris and Gigi), Louis Malle (Zazie dans le Metro), François Truffaut (The 400 Blows), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless), and William Wyler (How to Steal a Million).
Some of these pictures create a dream vision of Paris in the studio, most notably An American in Paris. The selections run the gamut, from historical recreations (also included: the 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame) to lavish musicals to romantic comedies to pictures shot on the streets in such a way that the action mingles with the ongoing life and rhythm of the city. And in the majority of cases, it’s utterly impossible to imagine the action being set anywhere else. There are a few omissions—it’s odd that there’s nothing by Eric Rohmer, Agnès Varda or Jacques Rivette, there’s nothing made after the mid-1960s, and where is Children of Paradise? But it’s a nice tribute to one of the most cinematic cities in the world.
I also wanted to mention the five-picture tribute to Peter Bogdanovich at the end of the month. Peter was a remarkable man in so many ways. He bridged the old and new Hollywoods, as a programmer, as a journalist and then as a filmmaker. With The Last Picture Show, he instantly became one of the most successful directors in the country. When his luck turned and his life was marked by tragedy, he just kept on doing what he loved: making movies and paying tribute to the masters who’d made the movies he loved. Peter’s death was a great loss, and I’m happy to see TCM paying him this tribute.
