Friday's Old Fashioned: So Long at the Fair (1950)

“Anything can happen in Paris.” So says Vicky Barton (Jean Simmons) who is arriving in the City of Lights for the first time on the eve of the 1889 World’s Fair in the company of her brother Johnny (David Tomlinson), a bit of a wet blanket, if you ask me, but nice enough, at least, to give her the hotel room with a view of the Eiffel Tower. He winds up in Room 19, a room which vanishes the next morning along with Johnny. Anything, indeed. And when everyone in the hotel claims not to have ever seen Johnny at all, Vicky is forced to find a way to prove his existence, eventually aided by a kindly artist, George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde), the only person who seems to believe her. “So Long at the Fair” makes great use of the Paris Exposition setting, including a hot air balloon blown to bits over the fairgrounds that is recounted in a long shot underlining Vicky’s stricken helplessness. Simmons is riveting, making the emotional turn from naïve to enraged to steely self-possession look like nothing, frequently holding the camera in the palm of her hand, so to speak, with powerful close-ups that communicate emotion directly to us. She’s so powerful, in fact, that she doesn’t quite match up with Bogarde who plays the whole thing too much like a drawing room mystery lark rather than something grave, diminishing the tension, not to mention their ostensible romance. The concluding twist is definitely grave. It’s grave but it also recalibrates everything in a way that does not make quite as much sense as it thinks, transforming a would-be bombshell into a senseless head-scratcher, a brewing tragedy into a limp whodunit.