Slightly French

A polite, charming riff on Pygmalion was a tyrannical director replaces his leading lady with Dorothy Lamour’s carnival worker. He remakes her entire personality into that of a glamorous French movie star by dangling the carrot of movie stardom and upward mobility. Along the way, she falls in love with him and they get a slightly forced happy ending.

Along the way Dorothy Lamour charms as an eager American guttersnipe, to borrow a phrase from Henry Higgins, that goes about the transformation. Her takedown and desertion of Don Ameche’s director is a huzzah moment where the creation turns toward its creator and demands respect for its agency. He did need her more than she needed him, and their skipping off into the sunset after a romantic reunion feels like the studio forcing Douglas Sirk into the “it’s a comedy so they must wind up together” trap. Although, Ameche was quite handsome, Lamour was a winner, so maybe there was more fertile soil here than may initially appear for their reunion. (Not really, but I’m trying!)

No matter as Slightly French has a lot of fun along the way poking fun at what an American would think Old World sophistication and mannerisms. Sirk knew that transformation was the name of the game in Hollywood. If anything, he indicts Ameche (and all of male Hollywood by extension) of using and abusing its female stars for their own ends. Forcing them to contort into shapes and images of the male imagination and not their own.