“For me as a kid, the film had everything I couldn’t have: cigarettes and train stations, late nights and drinking. Sex. Paris Blues set before me a dilemma I was feeling but couldn’t put into words and wouldn’t be able to for a long time.” 

—Darryl Pinckney, “For Snow Queens ...,” from issue no. 240 (Summer 2022)

Please join The Paris Review and Metrograph on Sunday, July 10, for a special screening of Paris Blues, starring Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman as émigré American jazz musicians making the city swing: the delectable score is by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, and there’s even a cameo from Louis Armstrong. Paris Blues is an exhilarating portrait of the mid-century bohemian milieu within which the Review, incidentally, came of age. The screening will be introduced by Darryl Pinckney, who first encountered the film on a local television station in 1964, the year of Freedom Summer. Alone in an upstairs bedroom of his childhood home in Indianapolis, he experienced an awakening—not to mention a surrender to the singularly heartbreaking beauty of Paul Newman.

Tickets are limited, and can be purchased here.

 

 

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