Socko Switcheroo

The nightclub was crowded with the kind of people who like to remember, while peering darkly into a glass, the last time they saw Paris. The baby spotlights focused down on a singer whose face was familiar. It looked a little older now, and the figure--despite the best efforts of Parisian couturiers--was perceptibly heavier. But when Lucienne Boyer began a husky-voiced singing of her old theme song, Parlez-moi &'Amour, it was almost like old times.

As she sang a handful of French torch songs, she tore at her blue-black hair, embraced an imaginary lover, went through the motions of strangling herself in one ballad, dropped to the floor in another (after supposedly swallowing poison). The crowd in Manhattan's Cafe Society Uptown loved every minute of it. Her one song in English, Hands across the Table, still carried a Paris label; despite three engagements in the U.S. before the war, she had been careful not to learn English too well.

Variety's show-wise Editor Abel Green summed up in typical Variety staccato: "1947 marks the great French invasion. It's a switcheroo on Yank tourism to Gay Paree. [Miss Boyer] packs herself to a socko sum total. The Francophiles . . . were sampling the grape like it was.7-Up. . . . Miss Boyer really rings the bell. They'll be waiting for Chevalier like French postcards."

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