cinema obscura: George Seaton's "Little Boy Lost" (1953)

George Seaton's hugely affecting "Little Boy Lost," one of the most impressive and personal films in star Bing Crosby's screen career, remains lost.  It is one of several black-&-white Paramount titles from the 1950s that have remained neglected on some shelf at the studio.


Shot on location in Paris in 1953 with a gritty feel for the place, Seaton's film - based on a novel of the same title by Marghanita Laski - is a wartime drama of dislocation, loss and regret, all of which are summed up in Crosby's poignant performance as Bill Wainwright, a star journalist - a major American correspondent (think Edward R. Murrow) stationed in Paris during World War II.

While there, he meets a singer Lisa Garret, played by Nicole Maurey, and they marry and have a son, named Jean.

Bill's work takes him to Dunkirk for a long stretch and, when he returns to Paris, neither his wife nor his little boy (Christian Fourcade) is there. Lisa has been murdered by the Nazis and Jean is homeless, stranded somewhere. Perhaps in an orphanage. After a stressful seach, that's exactly where Bill finds Jean but too much time has gone by.  He's uncertain if this Jean is his son or another sad little lost boy.

This remains a question that haunts Bill, one exacerbated by his grief over the loss of his wife. The boy needs a family.  Bill needs a son.  Does it matter that this little boy may not be his?  Writer-director Seaton is sensitive to this idea and his movie's resolution of it is entirely satisfying without ever pandering or being contrived.

 "Little Lost Boy" earns its tears.

And it certainly helps that the film feels more like a European production than a shiny big-studio effort - a quality that Seaton, as writer-director, brought to another compelling WW 2 film from Parmount, 1962's "The Counterfeit Traitor," starring William Holden and Lili Palmer.

Notes in Passing: "Little Boy Lost" was predated five years earlier by Fred Zinnemann's vaguely similar "The Search," in which a mother and son stage separate searches throughout post-war Berlin after they are torn apart by the Holocust. Jarmila Novotna and especially the gifted young Ivan Jandl provide a most poignant duet, even though they share no scenes together. Montgomery Clift, who made his film debut here for Zinnemann, turns in an unusually relaxed, companionable performance as an empathetic soldier with plans to adopt the boy, whom he names Jim, and bring him home to America. The "americanization" of Jim, to borrow from the title of another war-torn film, is achieved with remarkable ease and credibility by Zinnemann and Jandk's response to his direction.

Finally, it should noted that Crosby and Maury would be teamed again seven years later, this time in a lighter, more romantic vein, in Blake Edwards' campus lark, "High Time" of 1960, co-starring Fabien and Tuesday Weld, no less. Crosby plays a middle-aged man who elects to return to college - sure-fire if not exactly novel material: Rodney Dangerfield tried the stunt some 30-plus years ago in "Back to School" and, more recently, by Melissa McCarthy (added January 20, 2020).