Innocents in Paris (1953)

Innocents in Paris is a 1953 British-French international co-production comedy film produced by Romulus Films, directed by Gordon Parry and starring Alastair Sim, Jimmy Edwards, Claire Bloom, Margaret Rutherford, James Copeland and Ronald Shiner as Dicky Bird. The film features Louis de Funès as a taxi driver and uncredited appearances by Christopher Lee, Laurence Harvey and Kenneth Williams.
The film is a mild romantic comedy about a group of Britons flying out for a weekend in Paris in 1953 in a British European Airways Airspeed Ambassador. During this period, Britons could only take £5 (approx. £500 in 2010) of currency out of the country.

The character played by Margaret Rutherford is an amateur artist searching out the Mona Lisa in the Louvre; Claire Bloom is a young girl who finds romance with an older Frenchman (Claude Dauphin); Ronald Shiner is a Royal Marine bandsman out on the tiles for the night after winning a pool of all the French currency that each Marine had; Battle of Normandy veteran James Copeland is an archetypal Scotsman in kilt and Tam o' Shanter who finds love with a young French girl who "rescues" him with her sewing skills when his kilt rips in an amusement park; Jimmy Edwards plays a hearty Englishman who spends the entire weekend in an English-style pub; and Alastair Sim is a diplomatist, trying to obtain a signed agreement with his Russian counterpart (Peter Illing).

The writer and producer was Anatole de Grunwald, born in Russia in 1910, who fled to Britain with his parents in 1917. He had a long career there as a writer and producer, including the films The Way to the Stars, The Winslow Boy, Doctor's Dilemma, Libel, and The Yellow Rolls Royce.

The film displays the mores and manners of the British, and to a lesser extent, the French in the early fifties. It also features in the Russian nightclub, of which there were several in Paris at the time, Ludmila Lopato, the celebrated Russian tzigane chanteuse, singing the original Russian version of the song that, once translated, became "Those were the Days", made famous by Mary Hopkin.

Synopsis

Un groupe de personnages, absolument étrangers les uns aux autres, quittent Londres par avion pour passer le week-end à Paris. Nous suivrons les aventures et les tribulations de chacun des passagers de l'avion à son arrivée sur le sol français.

Actors