Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Great Film overall

Boring

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It is difficult getting past the terrible condition of the RKO Technicolor print for The French Line. It is even more difficult believing that nobody has wanted to do something about it. Someone: please clean it up, restore it, do whatever needs to be done. Jane Russell is superb as a sassy southern belle on a cruise to Europe. Adding to the fun is character actor Arthur Hunnicutt and leading man Gilbert Roland. The musical numbers are indeed risqué but the lyrics and choreography are not to be missed. Neither is Miss Russell's costuming which one must see to believe. Aside from a better print, the only way this film could have possibly been better: if Robert Mitchum had been in it.

It seems that the majority of people who have posted comments on this can't wait to note that it is both a rip-off of and inferior to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. There is, of course, something in this; both begin in the US, wind up in Paris with the bulk of the running time spent on the transatlantic crossing. Oh, yes, both also have songs. On the other hand I think it's possible to trace a more direct link to Warners' Romance On The High Seas in which Doris Day (in her first film) is travelling incognito, as is Jane Russell here, both girls are the subject of scrutiny by men hired to monitor their every moves and both men fall reciprocally in love with the girls they are tailing BUT not before ten reels or so of mistaken-identity plotting which itself is reminiscent of Top Hat. While GPB had to-drawer songs by Jule Styne and Leo Robin this time around Styne has been replaced by the bush league Josef Myrow and Robin has to settle for a co-lyricist credit with Robert Wells. It's worth watching without being memorable.

"The French Line" is a musical comedy about love and romance. It contains no sex scenes and no nudity or even toplessness. There is no violence, no foul language and no drug references. It is so square it even features a heterosexual male fashion designer. It seems like the sort of film that could be enjoyed by all the family without offending anyone.Wrong. When it was released in 1954 it was condemned as immoral by the Catholic League of Decency who, apparently, took exception to the supposedly revealing costumes worn by its star, Jane Russell. Ironically, Russell, herself a devout Christian, had been unhappy about wearing a bikini in the film and had been allowed to exchange this for a one-piece swimsuit, but even this gesture towards modesty failed to placate the League.The film is essentially a remake of a comedy from the thirties called "The Richest Girl in the World". In that film the heroine, Dorothy, was the heiress to a large fortune. She was worried that potential suitors would love her for her money and not for herself, and therefore changed places with her attractive secretary Sylvia. If any man showed an interest in the supposed 'Sylvia' (really Dorothy in disguise), she would suggest that the supposed 'Dorothy' (really Sylvia in disguise) had fallen in love with him and would welcome a proposal of marriage. The real Sylvia was happily married and had no interest in any of Dorothy's suitors; the point of this charade was that a man who showed any interest in the fake 'Dorothy' had failed the test and proved himself unworthy of the real Dorothy's hand.In "The French Line" this situation is given a new twist. The heroine, Mary, is also the heiress to a large fortune (from ranching and oil in Texas), but she has precisely the opposite problem. Whereas Dorothy was worried about attracting unscrupulous fortune-hunters, Mary (somewhat improbably for a girl who combines great wealth with the looks of Jane Russell) is unable to attract men at all, as potential husbands are actually deterred by the thought of all that money. (Well, this is a work of fiction). The film begins with Mary's third fiancé in succession breaking off their engagement.Mary is travelling to Europe on a luxury French liner, and swaps identities with a young fashion model named Myrtle in order to conduct a romance with a smooth French designer named Pierre. In the fifties models were presumably less well paid than they are today, when supermodels will not wake up for less than $10,000. Today a fashion model would probably have more in her bank account than a Texan oil millionairess. (Actually, that famous quote from Linda Evangelista dates back to the early nineties. Allowing for inflation, it must now cost at least $20,000 to get a supermodel out of bed).This is one remake that is rather better than its original. "The Richest Girl" is a very short film, and seventy minutes were not sufficient either to develop the characters or to bring out all the comic possibilities of the situation; the conclusion, in particular, is rushed and muddled. "The French Line" is a very light-hearted, frothy confection (in many places seeming to double up as an extended advertisement for the fashion industry), but at just over 100 minutes it does have more developed characters, not just Mary and Pierre, but also Myrtle and Mary's old friend Annie, also working as a fashion designer. The one character I did not like was Mary's guardian Waco Mosby. He was supposed to be a larger-than-life, tough-talking Texan, but because he seemed to be the sort of American who treated the Declaration of Independence as also being a declaration of war on the English language, I found it difficult to understand a word he was saying.Although the music is nothing special when compared to the likes of, say, Rodgers and Hammerstein, the song and dance numbers do add to the charm of the film, as well as showing off Jane Russell's charms to their best advantage. And any film which annoys America's narrow-minded Puritans cannot be wholly bad. 6/10

Jane Russell was an underrated comedienne and singer (see SON OF PALEFACE and GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES), but you'd never guess it from her display here. A real stinker, produced by Howard Hughes in his all-too-successful effort to kill off RKO Radio Pictures.The movie kills its first opportunity to show off sexy Jane when it places her in a bubble bath and then has her chastely singing "I'll Be Switched (If I Ain't Gettin' Hitched)"--and it's all downhill from there. In her autobiography, Russell apologized for the movie's number "Lookin' for Trouble" because it was supposedly so risque--nowadays you could show it on The Disney Channel. (By the way, said autobiography has a jaw-dropping photo of Russell in a bikini, far sexier than anything