Ah, Paris! That city of romance, danger and intrigue! Just the place to go for a night out, and where better to visit on an evening jaunt than that famed nightclub and theatre the Moulin Rouge? The show they put on there is truly spectacular, with singing and dancing galore, the very best entertainers in the world gravitate there, with speciality acts rubbing shoulders with celebrated entertainers, and the Can-Can performance is second to none. But the star of the entire show has to be Parysia (Olga Tschechowa), the alluring lady of the arts who performs every night to an adoring crowd, trilling her way through the best loved songs of the day and shaking a tailfeather as she does so...
But things are about to get decidedly tricky for Parysia as we discover over the course of the next two hours of full on, unrelenting melodrama which unexpectedly transformed into a nineteen-twenties version of The Fast and the Furious franchise in its second half, so keen was its writer and director Ewald André Dupont to deliver a complete night out for his audience. You would not have emerged from the auditorium in 1928 thinking, well, they could have put a lot more effort into that, because the movie positively strained at the seams with its force of will to keep the audience entertained, so much so that you half expected the cast to explode all over the screen come the grand finale.
What leads us to this emotionally overwrought state of affairs? Wouldn't you know it, but the glamorous Parysia has a daughter she has not clapped eyes upon in three years since the girl has been away at boarding school, but now she's back and all grown up in the shape of Eve Gray as Margaret, and to add a little spice, or rather to try and add a little spice only for the lid of the spice jar to pop off and accidentally pour the entire contents into your cooking, she is engaged. The lucky chap is Andre (Jean Bradin), and he thinks he's found the woman of his dreams - unfortunately he thinks that when he visits the Moulin Rouge and sees Parysia performing her act, leaving him keen to give Margaret the old heave-ho.
But he is wracked with guilt about fancying his potential mother-in-law, though not so wracked that we don't see him gazing longingly at a magazine of her photographs while in bed, and then casting it aside with an expression of much satisfaction on his features - what could he have been doing to produce such a result? Moving swiftly on, Andre finds he cannot simply say to his partner, sling yer hook, you mum's the real looker in your family, which sets up a load of soul searching as he broods ever more, though the real question that might be playing on your mind would be why Parysia and Margaret look almost the same age. The reason for that was because they were, with Tschechowa older than Gray by three years, which should give you an idea of how deliriously absurd Moulin Rouge was.
Naturally, if you can't indulge yourself in this sort of old time ridiculousness, you are not going to get on with this film, but if you enjoy a hoary old bit of nonsense that throws itself into its torrid feelings with wild abandon then this would do just the trick. The leading lady in this love triangle was a very big star of the silent era, a Russian-born German citizen who was lusted after by both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, and whose eventful life would be worth a biopic in itself. This was one of her most popular movies, and also the high-water mark of its director, a former critic (one of the first) who moved into helming his own projects and was a success in silents who found trouble when sound came in; Dupont would carry on in the industry, but never regained his former glories. Back at Moulin Rouge, Andre concocted a harebrained scheme to solve his romantic problems that places Margaret in danger, hence the high-octane car chase that took up a decent chunk of the plot, but the show must go on, all so we could sympathise with the glitzy suffering this wallowed in. Lots of fun for the enthusiast, and check out the cheeky Harold Lloyd looky-likey.
[Network's Blu-ray features a nicely restored print with soundtrack, and an image gallery as an extra.]
