THE FRENCH LINE 3-D (1953) **

When her fiancée leaves her high and dry, a sexy oil heiress (Jane Russell) tries to take her mind off things by taking a cruise to Paris.  She decides to find herself a new man too, but she wants to make sure that this time, it’ll be someone who loves her for her and not her money.  She gets more than she bargained for when she meets a French lothario (Gilbert Roland).

The French Line is a bit more tolerable than the last Jane Russell movie I saw, The Outlaw.  It has a standard issue story (the threadbare plot is a remake of the Fay Wray movie, The Richest Girl in the World), and the musical numbers are forgettable (Roland’s songs are particularly lame), but it does at least have the benefit of the 3-D gimmick.  As a 3-D aficionado, I would be remiss if I didn’t leap at the chance to see Jane Russell and her enormous talents in all their 3-D glory. 

The bubble bath number is nice because she gets to do a little teasing with the audience, hiding her exquisite frame inside the tub, while wrapped in a towel, and standing behind a partition.  While her figure doesn’t exactly leap out at the screen like the paddleball in House of Wax, Russell’s curves are accentuated by the format, even if director Lloyd Bacon doesn’t use the gimmick to its fullest potential.  Besides some bubbles that are blown into the camera, the only other eye-popping effect comes during a random ass musical number about people refusing to eat hors d’oeuvres when a waiter thrusts a tray into the audience.  The depth-of-field stuff looks okay during the dance numbers (especially the fashion show sequence), but the standard romance sequences don’t utilize the 3-D at all.

It’s probably more famous for how it was marketed than for what it actually contains.  Producer Howard Hughes had some great taglines in the ads like “See Jane Russell in 3-D!  She’ll knock BOTH your eyes out!”  That’s about all it took for me to check it out too.

Which leads us to the finale, which is the highlight.  It’s here where Jane sings “Lookin’ for Trouble” while dressed in a slinky one-piece that was so skimpy that it singlehandedly caused the film to lose its Production Code seal and become condemned by the Catholic Church.  Is it really that scandalous?  Well, there is one shot where Russell’s chassis just about lands in your lap, and for that oh-so brief moment, you thank the cinema gods for inventing 3-D.  Is it worth the wait?  Yes and no.  That moment will definitely get your motor running.  It’s just that the rest of the flick is so pedestrian that it almost feels like it came out of a different movie entirely.

The comprehensive 3-D rundown is as follows: 

·         3-D Bubbles

·         3-D Hors D’oeuvres 

·         3-D Fabric

·         3-D Jane Russell

Keep a lookout for Kim Novak making her film debut as one of Roland’s dancers, and Sandy Descher (the little girl from Them) also pops up as a bratty kid on the ship.