The titles of Richards Brooks's film The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) open against a tableau ofthe city, overlooked by a picture book Eiffel Tower and accompanied by Jerome Kern's romantic tune. A thirty-something man played by Van Johnson emerges from the Gare du Nord: he hails a taxi, strolls by the Europa news agency, visits Notre-Dame, and rests in the Jardin du Luxembourg, without once engaging in dialogue. He appears to be an American tourist absorbing a picturesque Paris, but his melancholic gaze is filled with regret as ifhe is returning to scenes charged with emotional resonance. The introduction of an innocent American abroad raises expectations of naIvete and cultural travel in the tradition of Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Henry James's early novel The American (1877). But the visitor's deeper emotions also invoke exile from the past and the homeland in the spirit of James's later modernist The Ambassadors (1903) and the 'lost generation' gloom of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1925). The film is actually based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Parisian story' Babylon Revisited' (1931) set just after the 1929 Stock Market Crash. While Fitzgerald's tale explores the consequences of the hedonistic lifestyle of middle-class metropolitan Americans abroad in the 1920s, Brooks's film shifts the time frame into a post-World War II context, with American GIs returning to Paris to recapture the excitement and passion of their fleeting wartime visits. When Charles Wales revisits the city in Fitzgerald's story he is disappointed 'to find Paris so empty'; rather than the frenzy of the mid-1920s he finds the stillness of the city' strange and portentous': a mirror image of his own spiritual vacuity. I Just as Fitzgerald's tale pieces together the ghostly revenants of Charles ' s past, so the film does not begin formally until the American visitor, Charlie, has completed his sentimental journey through the sights of Paris. He enters a bar and strikes up a conversation with the barman who greets him affectionately. When he glances at a striking portrait of a dark lady, it is clear that the narrative will reveal hidden links between the city, the portrait and Charlie's haunted face and, as they begin to reflect changes since the War, the scene dissolves into the past. In many ways the film's narrative is very conventional: Charlie falls in love with a flighty American girl, Helen, played by Elizabeth Taylor, whose iconic picture hangs in the bar. When Charlie meets Helen she has recently dropped out of university and has enough bohemian traits to make her into an enigma, without being wildly nonconformist. Her sister Marion initially takes a liking to the American in his GI uniform, but Helen and