Review: Paris Model, 1953

"Like you said, Charlie, any guy who gets married is a dope. So I'm looking for a dope."

Review: Paris Model – 1953: A certain dress design ("number 89, nude at midnight, $890 dollars") is passed from girl to girl (in this case Marilyn Maxwell, Barbara Lawrence, Paulette Goddard, Gloria Christian and Eva Gabor) and each girl experiences a different, but rather similar, adventure while wearing the dress.

Gabor's character uses it to hypnotize men, insisting that they stare into her eyes (which gives us a close-up of her face, along with whoever she wants to take under her control, Bela Lugosi-style. In particular she is after Tom Conway as the super-wealthy Maharajah of Kim-Kepore. When we get his close-up we wish he was getting better sleep.) Though Gabor's dress seems indomitable, it turns out Laurette Luez (as Lisa) is able to draw off the Maharajah in a slightly different style black dress. Gabor's character then heads to the roulette table to see if the dress brings any better luck there, and then wiped-out, she returns"number 89" to the dress shop for credit.

Marilyn Maxwell (as Marion Parmalee) employs the dress as a way to sway a corporate boss (Cecil Kellaway as 'P.J.' Sullivan) to name her husband as his replacement. Her effort, accompanied with sitting on the guy's lap and in general playing games with him, brings her within minutes of success at a corporate get-together only to have Sullivan's announcement of his successor to suddenly veer sideways when his wife (Florence Bates) stands up and announces a different, and "safer" candidate. The irony in the script (by Robert Smith) is that Marilyn Maxwell was working on the wrong Sullivan all along, Mrs. Sullivan was the decision maker at the company.

This episodic film gives us Paulette Goddard as a legal secretary and uses the dress to take a swipe at stealing her boss from his nagging wife (played by Gloria Christian), only to get flummoxed when very close to success when the clever wife shows up in a copy of the same dress and instantly reclaims her almost-looted husband. (Then Goddard accidentally gets the dress ripped right off her when it catches on a nail. Goddard losing her dress seems to be a running joke across several of her films.)

Our last "story" in Paris Model is Barbara Lawrence as a young woman trying to get her high school sweetheart to get down to business with a marriage proposal. With an evening dinner date ahead, she shows the dress to her mother. Mom says: if he doesn't propose with that dress, he's never going to do it. At the evening dinner (which features Michael Romanoff in a small, sympathetic role along with his restaurant Romanoff's) the young man (Robert Hutton) opines on the wonders of bachelorhood while Lawrence's character finally just gets up and takes her overcoat off, revealing "number 89." The young man goes into a kind of shock and, what do you know, the Maharajah of Kim-Kepore is in the restaurant and immediately sends over an invitation for Lawrence's character to come over and stay at his table (he doesn't look like he's had any more rest than he did before). The hesitating young man, with the pressure now built to a do-or-die moment, proposes marriage to the dress to "his girl."

There is a genre of films preoccupied with the world of fashion, and Paris Model is, at best, a sub-B-film within that genre, hampered by limited sets and the almost TV-like episodic nature of the tale, though we do have a nice cast. The weak humor tries to draw the film toward screwball territory, but can't quite make the connection, instead wallowing in sexist nonsense, circa 1953. Some of these characters are rather loathsome when stripped of the Hollywood glamour that the actors bring to the roles. As an insight into Paris fashion or even just the world of women's clothing, "number 89" is supposed to be a kind of super-weapon but each episode debunks the claim: it appears the dress is really at its best when snaring women, not men. In a way, that's a clever trick from the script, but it is hard to tell if it was ever intended.

What's Recent

Original page May 2026