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Any reasonable viewer would expect a certain guaranteed level of enjoyment from a ’60s romantic comedy set in Paris that stars William Holden and Audrey Hepburn. Yet somehow, Paris When It Sizzles squanders ever ounce of its cast’s and location’s good will and transforms itself into a cinematic shit-show if there ever was one. Holden plays a procrastinating screenwriter holed up in Paris and pushed up against a deadline. He hires Hepburn, a typist, to spend two days with him while he dictates to her. While they write together, we dive in and out of their imaginings of what the characters are going through. Their alter egos are spies who fall in love with each other, even though they aren’t sure they can trust one another. Half the film is comprised of the film-within-a-film, stream-of-consciousness, genre-bending, meta-film shenanigans. The other half is centered around Holden and Hepburn’s writer characters falling in love. Both halves suck ass.
Holden is typecast here, in the worst way possible. He’s at his most verbose, self-aggrandizing, snarky worst in this movie. Hepburn is his plaything, rarely getting any moments to shine. She’s there to react to him. There’s no authenticity in their chemistry or relationship. There’s even less verisimilitude in the movie-within-the-movie sequences, which are made up on the whim, with stakes as light as air and ever-changing. The cardinal sin of this film is that there is no one and nothing worth caring about. The film and its characters don’t take themselves seriously, so why should we? When the stakes aren’t real or grounded, and everything is changing on the fly, why stick around to see what happens?
The only time this kind of thing works is in a broad comedy like Airplane or Top Secret! To be fair, Paris When It Sizzles tries very hard to be funny. Too hard. But it never finds its groove and the laughs are spread too thin. Tony Curtis gets a few of them as a tertiary police officer in the film-within-a-film storyline. He thinks he’s more important to the story than he is, so other characters have to keep reminding him that no one cares what his name is or what he thinks. The best part of the movie is when Hepburn gets drunk while spit-balling story ideas. This is how she and Holden end up in an airplane battle, and how Holden turns into a literal vampire trying to suck Hepburn’s blood. If these moments sound interesting, let me assure you they are stand alone in this soulless, air-headed exercise in pointless tedium.
Directed by Robert Quine. With Gregoire Aslan, Raymond Bussieres, and Noel Coward.