A miscellany of melodrama that converges upon one long night of pathos and pleasure, hosted by the insufferable Al Wonder (Al Jolson) at his titular Parisian nightclub. Lloyd Bacon’s direction is workmanlike, and Busby Berkeley’s musical intervention fails to make the film transcend its modest intentions, especially the ten-minute Blackface sequence that represents every fucking racial stereotype of the time. But holy shit is this Pre-Code!
So, we get some funny moments such as a hetero couple dancing when another man cuts in...and dances away with the other man! “Boys will be boys”! It’s unexpected and hilarious, and though Al Wonder says his line in the effeminate, no other couple seems bothered by it. We also get two old married men (Guy Kibee & Hugh Herbert) flirting with two buxom young ladies, while their wives (Ruth Donnelly & Louise Fazenda) are seduced by a debonair and seedy man (he has his own business cards!). They play musical tables while being played for laughs, while another absurd subplot involves a “stolen” necklace, the wife of a rich banker (Kay Francis), and the dancing duo of Ricardo Cortez and Dolores del Rio. This subplot literally crashes into another concerning a once wealthy businessman who spends his final $30,000 in a final night of swinging before committing suicide. And our fine host Al Wonder uses this act of self-destruction to cover up a murder...all with good intentions, of course.
The Busy Berkeley numbers don’t seem inspired and rather dull, unlike most of his work. The first major sequence involves many scantily clad women in silken gowns frolicking about, as the high angle and overhead shots depict this mass of moving mammaries coalescing into various designs. The use of mirrors to extend the illusion to excess seems a bit trite, and the entire sequence becomes “we’ve seen this before and done better” by Mr. Berkeley. The second ten-minute number is quite problematic, as it’s Al Jolson singing about “Going to Heaven on a Mule”...in blackface. But that’s not all folks, as every fucking character in the skit, including children, are slathered in blackface. It’s a checklist for every racial stereotype that still permeates our society today, whose details I don’t feel any need to identify. Jolson ends the skit reading a Yiddish newspaper, so I suppose that’s the punchline.
Musical numbers aside, the film ends by wrapping up its myriad interludes somewhat neatly yet fails to finish with the best punchline! As the married couples flirt with future engagements, Ruth Donnelly says to her cohort that she’ll “put a sleeping drought in her husband’s drink at bedtime” so they can have an evening affair with Mr. Business-card. But their husbands are planning on sneaking out after bedtime to meet their flings. Now, why not end on the joke of the men planning their own droughts for their wives? Then they both sleep through their ill-planned liaisons. Ha! However, the film fades out before a proper punchline.
Final Grade: (C-)