Paul and Michelle


Paul and Michelle is a 1974 drama film directed and produced by Lewis Gilbert, whose story Vernon Harris and Angela Huth dramatized. It is a sequel to the 1971 film Friends, by the same director and with the same lead actors.

Plot

Taking place approximately three years after the events in Friends, Paul and Michelle follows the family of Paul Harrison and Michelle Latour after they have been reunited. At the beginning of the film Paul finishes prep school and he informs his father that he plans to look for Michelle and now because he is a legal adult he can no longer stop him. Paul has to cope with the difficulties he faces balancing work, college, and trying to maintain their family as well as a new love interest for Michelle.
The actor portraying Paul's father, Ronald Lewis, went on to receive a knighthood, this role was Lewis's last feature film appearance.

Cast

of the Chicago Tribune gave the film one-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "Paul and Michelle are not real human beings; their responses are contrived. Both treat the world as a large doll house, while the script treats them as caricatures of what teen-agers might think young adults were like 20 years ago." Variety wrote that "instead of combining elements into some semblance of acceptable soap, Gilbert merely piles one ingredient on top of the other without sorting each out for proper emotional emphasis. By trafficking in stereotypes, producer-director makes neither the lovers nor their various predicaments absorbing, believable or even interesting." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Lewis Gilbert "should have left well alone" after Friends, because the sequel "is hopelessly contrived and tedious." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post called it "an eminently uncalled-for sequel" that ends "with another separation and the threat of another sequel three years hence, when Paul will have finished college and be ready to assume the full burdens of a family man. If the moviegoing public has any regard for its own welfare, it will take this threat seriously and help prevent Lewis Gilbert from making a fool of himself three times in a row."