Paris Blues (1961) film notes by Tova Gannana for CSA Hitchcock

In a basement club a jazz band plays each night as the stars come out. Candles in wine bottles drip on the tables. Men and women sit and sip. Some dance, some lean with their back to the bar. All are listening to Ram Bowen (Paul Newman) on trombone, Eddie Cook (Sidney Poitier) on sax, Michel "Gypsy" Devigne (Serge Reggiani) on guitar, and the rest of the gents swinging and wailing away. La nuit du jazz; to be awake in Paris is to be in one of these spots. The streets where Club Privé is seated are tight, crowded with people and movements of the night. Ram drinks wine, Eddie drinks milk, and Gypsy does heroin. While Gypsy fades away, Eddie and Ram stay up composing and arranging, getting into the arguments you get into when you collaborate. They wear suits; Eddie’s is sharper. Ram’s tongue is quicker; he is meaner. They are Americans in Paris. Exiled for different reasons, they have jazz in common. For Eddie it’s not just the jazz, but to live in France in 1961 as a black American man. The pianist Aaron Bridgers, who plays the piano in Paris Blues (1961), left the US for France. In 1974 Bridgers became a French citizen. It is not Newman and Poitier we hear play, but American jazz musicians such as Max Roach flying on the drums. The film score was composed by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. When he speaks, Ram is the opposite of how he plays. He talks and he pushes people away. He wants to write a great piece of music. Ram carries around his composition like an instrument. He is ambitious and surly. Eddie takes it from Ram even though he tells him, “I ought to walk.” They are in Paris Blues together. They understand what Paris is to each other. 

Music fills every frame in Paris Blues as though the images of the film were notes on a page, notes floating in the air. The first sound of the film is Ram’s trombone like the whistle that brings you running to the station. Ram wears a bracelet, Eddie has a tie clip, little details that tell of someone who is paying attention. 

A train arriving in Paris with Wild Man Moore (Louis Armstrong) is greeted by screaming fans in overcoats holding signs welcoming him. Ram walks behind them. He has come to greet Wild Man in his private car. They are friends from the States. On the same train are two women, Connie (Diahann Carroll) and Lillian (Joanne Woodward), who have come on vacation, two weeks to see the city. Connie is the first to see Ram. He helps her with her luggage. “Is your girlfriend as pretty as you are?” Ram asks Connie. Connie who is black replies, “Yes. She’s a white girl.” He snaps back, “She might be hard to find. All these white girls look alike.” Lillian shows up; she has found a cab. She recognizes Ram from his records. Ram turns to Connie with an invite, “You want to hear me play some night just tell the cab driver, ‘Marie’s Cave,” okay?” Connie is less impressed than Lillian. 

It is Eddie who first sees Connie and Lillian at the club. Later that night, Eddie walks around Paris with Connie. He tells her,“I like to walk and I like the way you walk and Paris is the city to walk in.” What he says sounds like a piece of music. “Look at it,” Eddie tells Connie, “and not just what you see, but the way the place makes you feel. I’ll never forget the way I felt the first day I walked down Avenue Champs Elysées. Just like that I knew I was here to stay.” Eddie has been in Paris for five years with no intent to go back to the States. In Paris he can sit for lunch without getting clubbed. Parisians are not colorblind, they see that he is a black man, but they are also not blinded by color. They treat him like a man. Connie, a school teacher, tells Eddie, “Home, to me, is home. My family is my family. And whatever problems they’ve got, I’ve got them, too.” 

It is Lillian who intends to pick up Ram. She fishes her wish and wakes up next to him. Music is a hard act to follow. Ram doesn’t want the morning newspaper or the shades drawn or sunshine before noon. Ram doesn’t want to return to the States to live in a quiet house in the suburbs. “When it’s quiet in my house it usually means the children are asleep.” Lillian, a divorcée, counters. Lillian falls in love with Ram because of the way his music makes her feel. The musician becomes the magician. Lillian falls under Ram’s spell. The last words Lillian speaks to Ram are her reversal, “You’re never going to forget me. You’re gonna walk down the street of wherever you happen to be; you’re gonna see me, even when you know I’m not there.” Ram will for the rest of his life, or until he forgets her, be in the audience as Lillian pulls rabbits out of her hat. 

Paris Blues is as much about what brings people together as about what pulls them apart. You can listen to jazz your whole life and only understand that what you are hearing is a perfect mystery like wind through the trees. Eddie and Ram export themselves to Paris because they cannot find their place in America. But Jazz is to America what salt is to the earth. America is not the Ford Model T, but Louis Armstrong and his horn. It is not the railroad tracks across the States, but Harriet Tubman and her underground train. It is not the Edison Electric Company and their light bulbs, but George Washington Carver and his invention of peanut butter. It is not the movies of Hollywood, but the desire to tell stories and fill seats. It is not the songs themselves, but the voices of those who sing. It is not home is where the heart or hearth is, but where you and your kin can feel free. America as a creation can still create. America as a changeling can still change. It is the concrete and the imagination. It is the building blocks and the foundation. It is not the speeches, but the action. The only open road left is that which will take us to the future.