ABSTRACT
Four movie musicals shot on location from 1957–1958 – Silk Stockings, Les Girls, Funny Face and Gigi – presented Paris as a set piece, a prettified site of parks, clubs and night time street corners and courtyards. The city still defined the essential joys of life, embodied in romance between a man and a woman. Having Americans travel, work and prosper in filmic Paris aligned the United States with the cosmopolitanism, beauty and sophistication that the place signified. These films emerged in the 1950s to assert Americans’ claim over Paris and its tradition as a capital of culture; it was a takeover defined by nostalgia, desire and longing. More Americans experienced the city in person during the 1950s, but the images – and the imagining – of these films were more the point. They reinforced the idea that what is found in Paris is enduring, much as both French and American people in the newly fractious and explosive mid-20th century wanted to believe.
