ABSTRACT
Certain post-war stage and film musicals traded on the fluidity between timeless Paris and much more localised recreations of its symbolic freedoms. With one of these, Can-Can, a curious double-image arises between its 1953 Broadway staging, mounted during the McCarthy era, and the 1960 film, catering to an audience on the brink of the 1960s sexual revolution. The stage version addresses such serious issues as censorship and the hypocrisy of prosecuting inhumane and unjust laws. In contrast, the film adaptation twists its characters and songs to quite different ends, with a result accurately described as ‘Las Vegas, 1960, not Montmartre, 1896’. How and why this happened provides the main content of this chapter, with special attention to the redeployment of its songs and the realities of Parisian life that were strategically absent from one version or the other. The film adaptation is shown to have its own distinctive and serious aims despite its apparent betrayal of the stage show: to urge Americans to break free of their Puritan inhibitions. It thus reimagines Paris as a proto-Las Vegas, representing the eternal feminine of the demi-monde as the ideal playground for the kind of man who reads Playboy and the quintessential town for such a man to be about.
