The French Line (1954)

Director:

Lloyd Bacon

Writers:

Matty Kemp (story) and
Isabel Dawn (story) ...

Release Date:

8 February 1954 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Musical | Romance

Tagline:

THAT Picture! THAT Dance! - you've heard so much about!

Plot:

Oil heiress Mame Carson takes an incognito cruise so that men will love her for her body, not her money.

Plot Keywords:

Rich | Ocean Liner | Texas | Voyage | Oil

Cast

Jane Russell	...	Mary 'Mame' Carson
Gilbert Roland	...	Pierre DuQuesne
Arthur Hunnicutt	...	'Waco' Mosby
Mary McCarty	...	Annie Farrell
Joyce Mackenzie	...	Myrtle Brown (as Joyce MacKenzie)
Rita Corday	...	Celeste (as Paula Corday)
Scott Elliott	...	Bill Harris
Craig Stevens	...	Phil Barton
Kasey Rogers	...	Katherine 'Katy' Hodges (as Laura Elliott)
Steven Geray	...	François, Ship Steward
John Wengraf	...	Commodore Renard
Michael St. Angel	...	George Hodges
Barbara Darrow	...	Donna Adams
Barbara Dobbins	...	Kitty Lee

Runtime:

102 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Colour:

Colour (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Sound System)

Certification:

West Germany:18 | Finland:S | USA:Approved | Australia:G

Filming Locations:

Paris, France

Company:

RKO Radio Pictures

Trivia:

Originally presented in 3-D, with the tagline "See Jane Russell in 'The French Line' - she'll knock BOTH your eyes out!"

Movie Connections:

Featured in Singles (1992)

Soundtrack:

ANY GAL FROM TEXAS

Back when the Legion of Decency still had some clout...

Before Howard Hughes managed to destroy his play toy, RKO Radio Pictures, with one production after another that fared rather dismally at the box office and, certainly, with the critics, his sexual preoccupations were on full view in "The French Line"

The Roman Catholic censorship body, the Legion of Decency, did a great deal more to boost receipts than the first-run 3-D presentations ever could when they "Condemned" this one, for all the usual sex-related reasons, since even then the depiction of excessive violence was given a pass. Once a year those of us who attended Sunday Mass regularly found ourselves trapped into taking the L. of D. Pledge (Very few dared remain seated, lemmetellya!), which required us to promise that we would not patronize theaters which made a practice of booking "Condemned" films. Since only foreign films, usually those originating in France, managed to get the "Condemned" accolade and they rarely made it beyond the few New York theaters willing to book them, the stricture about avoiding those lascivious pleasure palaces that dared book a "Condemned" film was interpreted to mean that just one disgraceful example of cinematic lechery could get them placed on the list of verboten venues.

When the Picwood Theater in West Los Angeles (which had a massive auditorium with a huge screen), not far from where we lived in Pacific Palisades at the time, was selected to show "The French Line" in 3-D, I was darned if I was going to have to wait until a neighborhood theater showed M-G-M's "The Swan", Grace Kelly's Hollywood curtain call, on a much smaller screen than when it was booked onto the Picwood's CinemaScope eye-stretcher, only a couple of years after management had dared book Jane Russell's eye-popping embarrassment. Eventually I managed to see "The French Line" on television, by which time our standards of taste had slipped somewhat, and I was sure hard put to understand what that big stink had all been about.