Once in Paris

When American writer Michael Moore arrived in Paris for the first time, he couldn't speak French and he had been a devoted husband for 8 years... When he departed he still couldn't speak French... an American Love Story Wayne Rogers, star of "MASH", is a screen-writer on his first visit to Paris to perform emergency surgery on a sick script. He is gathered up by Jack Lenoir, a new discovery, as the street-wise, angle-playing chauffeur assigned to him by the production company. The emerging and then threatened comradeship between Rogers and Lenoir is part of the carefully observed and interesting substance of the film. There is, of course, a beautiful woman in the suite and on the balcony next door. She is Gayle Hunnicutt, a jetsetter of independent mind. It is quite lovely, and the extended montage in which they discover each other, and Paris at its most unbearably alluring, is an absolute model of both eloquence and restraint. What is most remarkable is that the montage manages to convey the dangerous deepening of the relationship from a no-illusions fling (he is happily married and she presumably cherishes her independence) to something that cannot end easily.