A different way of telling a story

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

In Paris, matronly interior decorator Ingrid Bergman (as Paula Tessier) fears, at 40, she's getting old. Playboy businessman Yves Montand (as Roger Demarest) cancels a dinner date with Ms. Bergman. After their next engagement, Mr. Montand doesn't stay for sex with Bergman. Instead, he goes out to pick up a younger woman. Obviously, their five year affair has lost its luster. Later, Bergman meets a wealthy client's son, bubbly law student Anthony Perkins (as Philip Van der Besh). He's 25-years-old. Immediately attracted to his mom's decorator, Mr. Perkins takes Bergman for a ride in his fast sports car and invites her to lunch...Produced and directed by Anatole Litvak, "Goodbye Again" features a trio of stars who certainly looked better on paper. We don't see much for Bergman to find attractive in either Perkins or Montand. Frankly, Bergman isn't especially attractive to either man, either. There is little passion in either pairing. Bergman is morbid. Perkins too silly. Montand seems disinterested even in the sexpots that appear in his bed. Other than having the younger heads popping in front of the camera, Mr. Litvak's dance scene near the end looks good. He uses automobiles to parallel his characters; at one point, Bergman's tears cover her car's windshield.**** Goodbye Again (5/61) Anatole Litvak ~ Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Perkins, Yves Montand, Jessie Royce Landis

A triangle occurs in 1961 Paris when Bergman 45 is pursued by Anthony Perkins 29. Bergman allows things to happen only because her partner Yves Montand 40 is unfaithful.I was amused to see other reviewers reflect what I feel about Perkins. He was being groomed to be a leading man after his fame in Psycho. In 2 years he makes a film with first Bergman then Loren and finally the bottom of the barrel Mercouri. The problem with Perkins other than his Psycho association is he is sexless and looks like a scare crow. Plus his facial expressions are unappealing and he wears too much mascara----did I mention? he is also he is far far too skinny and waif like. In fact what is appealing about him? Almost zero.He is anything but a leading man and these sexy strong women make it all the more obvious that he is miscast. He is destined in life to make things like Psycho IV.One more thing why do the French love ugly actors (Depardieu Montand). I am sorry Yves Montand was not handsome he needed a chin implant to start. This movie is worth watching for Bergman's performance only that saved it for me.

Ingrid Bergman plays Paula Tessier, a 40ish interior decorator with a long-running relationship with a chronically unfaithful man, Roger Demarest (Yves Montand). The twenty-something son of one of her clients, Phillip (Anthony Perkins), falls in love with her and she turns the tables on Roger by having an affair of her own. Bergman gives a solid, heartfelt performance and Montand is so attractively world-weary, it's easy to see why she can't fall out of love with him. Perkins' Phillip is a spoiled mama's boy and it's hard to understand the Bergman character's attraction to him, outside of the fact that she feels so hurt and neglected. The film's cinematography is beautiful and Paris looks gorgeous and, by today's standards, remarkably free of traffic.

It amazes me to find out that Anthony Perkins won the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor award for his skittish, petulant performance as Philip, the aimless, lovestruck "younger man" in this 1961 Paris-set soap opera about a May-September romance with Paula, a successful, fortyish interior decorator ensnared in a going-nowhere relationship with Roget, an age-appropriate transportation businessman who has casual affairs with young women he dubs impersonally as "Maisie". Naturally, Roget takes Paula for granted, which leaves her vulnerable to Philip's flirtatious advances. However, Perkins is an actor intractably tethered to his definitive role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho", and unfortunately in his first follow-up film, he emits such a creepy, obsessive tone that makes you fear more for Paula's life than her heart.On the upside is Ingrid Bergman's textured performance as Paula, and her mature beauty seems to reflect perfectly her saturnine situation. She is believably matched with Yves Montand as Roget in a performance that seems to echo his real-life situation with wife Simone Signoret when he embarked on a well-publicized affair with Marilyn Monroe the year before. Jesse Royce Landis shows up in her typical role as a pompous society matron, this time Philip's cheapskate mother, while Diahann Carroll shows up in a disposable cameo as a world-weary jazz chanteuse. Director Anatole Litvak paces the film a bit too leisurely and adds some silly but amusing touches like Paula's delusion of rain as she drives during a crying jag, but he creatively uses a circular structure to his plot by beginning and ending the film with almost the same scene. Adapting Francoise Sagan's "Aimez-vous Brahms?", screenwriter Samuel Taylor lends the sort of wry observations he contributed to his scripts for "Sabrina" and "Vertigo". As of March 2008, this film is not available on DVD.