Marie (Clara Bow) and her boyfriend Armand (Donald Keith) are both members of a gang of thieves operating in Paris. One night, the gang decides to break into the home of Pierre Marcel (Lou Tellegen), a famous scientist, while they believe he’s away. But it turns out Pierre is at home the night of the burglary and it all goes horribly wrong. The police show up and one of the gang members is shot and killed when Armand tries to protect Pierre from being killed. Unfortunately for Armand, he’s wounded during the fight and ends up with blood poisoning.
Grateful for his efforts to save his life, Pierre allows Armand to stay with him to recuperate. Pierre also recognizes Armand as a former student of his. Pierre really takes Armand under his wing and starts introducing him to respectable members of society and helps him get on the path toward putting his criminal past behind him. When Marie finds out about it, she’s extremely jealous, especially when she sees Armand with another woman Pierre has introduced him to.
Absolutely furious, Marie decides to get revenge by marrying Pierre and taking all of his money. She pretends to be another woman to get into Pierre’s home and her plan starts working out very well. He falls madly in love with Marie and it isn’t long before they’re engaged to be married. On their wedding night, she reveals the truth to Pierre while other members of her gang wait outside to shoot her for what they believe was turning against them. But the gang only manages to wound Marie and as she recovers, Pierre realizes how much she loves Armand and decides the best thing he can do is get a divorce so they can be together.
I really like Clara Bow, but haven’t seen many of her movies, so I had pretty high hopes for Parisian Love. Unfortunately, this was definitely not one of Bow’s better movies. The story wasn’t particularly interesting and the character didn’t have quite the same spark that I loved so much in It, Wings, and Call Her Savage. If you’ve never seen a Clara Bow movie before, do yourself a big favor and see one of those movies instead of Parisian Love; you’ll have a much better understanding of why she was such a big star. Pretty much the only noteworthy things I noticed in the movie were the allusions to Pierre having a crush on Armand. Even at 65 minutes, it still struggled to hold my interest for that time.
