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"Gigi" (1958)
Director: Vincente Minnelli. Cast: Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan.
 If this film were released today, instead of earning nine Oscars including Best Picture, it would be seen as child sexploitation.
Even in the 1950s, the sentiments in this great MGM musical were shockingly dated; it's set in France about 1900. Jourdan, a rich industrialist and bored playboy, enjoys jesting with exuberant teenager Caron (she's supposed to be about 15, though she was actually 26 at the time of the film's release).
Caron, as Gigi of course, is being trained by her aunt and grandmother to be a courtesan. They teach her to make airheaded conversation, distinguish expensive jewelry from cheap pieces, and sprawl elegantly on a sofa.
They also teach her to drink wine.
"You have to fully enjoy the aroma," her haughty aunt says. "On your first sip, hold it on the roof of your mouth for a moment and breathe through your nose. Then you will feel the flavor. ... A bad year will be sharp. A good year, which this is of course, will waft."
Jourdan is bored with such Parisian society ladies and enjoys Caron's girlish ways. He plies her with Champagne when her grandmother (Hermione Gingold) has her back turned. When he loses a bet to Caron and thus agrees to take her to the beach for a weekend, Caron jumps into his lap and he spanks her suggestively as she swills Champagne from his glass.
But instead of summoning the gendarmes, Gingold joins the nascent winter-spring romantic couple for the delightful song, "The Night They Invented Champagne." The song glosses over the actual accidental discovery in the 17th century of spontaneous secondary fermentation leading to fizzy carbon dioxide, but it is a musical comedy, after all.
The antiquated thinking doesn't stop with underage drinking and seduction. Once he realizes his feelings for Caron have morphed, Jourdan proposes to set her up as his mistress, with a good apartment and all her bills paid. He's furious when she rejects the offer.
"Gigi" is lovable on several levels. For fans of French cuisine, it's interesting to see famous restaurants, especially Maxim's, tarted up to appear as they did in 1900. The comedy is funny, the songs are good, and Chevalier is still a joy to watch.
Plus, this is not a movie that can ever be made again. In one of his best numbers, Jourdan stalks through scenic Paris singing, "She's a child." Yep, she is. And people call "Vertigo" perverse.
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