The title of Paris Model (1953) doesn't refer to a person but a dress: an expensive Paris original called "Nude at Midnight" which works its way (in one form or another) through the lives of four women, all of whom turn to this seductive dress, with its figure-enhancing design and daring décolleté, to snare their man. They are huntresses on the trail of big game and they dress for the part. The film, released by Columbia Pictures but independently produced on a sub-studio budget by Albert Zugsmith, is built on four separate short stories, each with a different leading lady filling out the hand-me-down dress: Marilyn Maxwell, Paulette Goddard, Eva Gabor and Barbara Lawrence. The four actresses were either on the downside of their career or still working at stardom but they all had one thing in common: they had impressive figures that brought out the best in this tight-fitting dress.

Eva Gabor, more famous as a high society celebrity than as an actress, starts the film off as a Paris socialite who lives off the generosity of older men with healthy bankbooks; she buys the dress (for a small fortune, which she charged to one of her admirers) to hook a rich Maharajah (Tom Conway, the brother of George Sanders) with a hopelessly bland personality. The role parodies Gabor's reputation and she embraces the comic part with verve and tongue-in-cheek guile.

The second story, about a seductive secretary trying to steal her boss away from his shrewish wife with the help of the dress (this time a knock-off of the original pirated by an unscrupulous New York fashion shop), stars the versatile, lively and still lovely Paulette Goddard. After a career that included the all-star actress showcase The Women (1939), three Cecil B. DeMille adventures and two Charlie Chaplin classics (Modern Times [1936] and The Great Dictator [1940]), her career was on the decline by 1953 but her comic talent is in fine form. Her sexy, slyly seductive performance (and frequent flashes of her shapely legs) helps overcome an otherwise unpleasantly mercenary character.

Top-billed Marilyn Maxwell, a curvaceous platinum blonde most famous for playing the lovely foil to Bob Hope, both onscreen (The Lemon Drop Kid [1951]) and in his USO shows, plays a married woman who purchases the dress (by now a second hand purchase from a middle-America dress shop) for a different kind of seduction: to woo a retiring company president (Cecil Kellaway) into picking her husband as his replacement.

Barbara Lawrence, the youngest of the film's leading ladies (she was groomed by 20th Century-Fox in such high-profile films as A Letter to Three Wives [1949] and The Star [1952]) anchors the fourth and final story as a sweet but frustrated California girl who dons the dress to encourage a proposal from her big-talking but commitment-shy boyfriend (Robert Hutton). The low-budget recreation of the legendary Hollywood eatery Romanoff's is unconvincingly cobbled out of curtains and stock furniture, but it co-stars the actual Prince Michael Romanoff as himself, the restaurateur playing cupid for the naïve lovebirds.

Producer Albert Zugsmith began his career with bargain basement exploitation movies like the post-apocalypse thriller Captive Women (1952) and the red scare film Invasion USA (1952). Paris Model, made for a more adult audience, is an upgrade in ambition and star power but just as budget-minded and he brought along Invasion USA director Alfred E. Green to help fake studio gloss on a low budget.

A journeyman director who had worked steadily since his directorial debut in the silent era, Alfred Green directed George Arliss to an Academy Award in the 1929 Disraeli. He also made the notorious Baby Face (1933) with Barbara Stanwyck, one of the sexiest and most salacious films of the early sound era before the production code, before settling into a career of mid-level productions. Paris Model was one of his last films before moving into television and his exhaustion shows. Zugsmith, however, was on his way up and he subsequently brought his formula of classy settings for exploitation projects to such films as Written on the Wind (1956), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and Touch of Evil (1958).

Producer: Albert Zugsmith
Director: Alfred E. Green
Screenplay: Robert Smith
Cinematography: William Bradford
Art Direction: William Glasgow
Music: Albert Glasser
Film Editing: W. Donn Hayes
Cast: Marilyn Maxwell (Marion Parmalee), Paulette Goddard (Betty Barnes), Eva Gabor (Gogo Montaine), Barbara Lawrence (Marta Jensen), Cecil Kellaway (Patrick J. Sullivan aka P.J.), Robert Hutton (Charlie Johnson), Leif Erickson (Edgar Blevins), Tom Conway (Maharajah of Kim-Kepore), Aram Katcher (Louis-Jean Vacheron), Florence Bates (Mrs. Nora Sullivan).
BW-80m.

by Sean Axmaker