The Louvre in 1963

My husband recently bought a Roku unit because we want to eliminate cable from our budget soon, but want to be able to view EWTN. He found a channel with old movies and documentaries, including a 1963 film about the Louvre Museum, hosted by Charles Boyer, and produced and directed by Lucy Jarvis. This is of course, the Louvre long before the I.M. Pei glass pyramid. It's in the days when ladies wore hats and gentlemen did too, but took them off while indoors (unlike fellows wearing their baseball caps at the table in restaurants now!--and now I sound persnickety and old-fashioned and I guess I am). You can see a sample of the film here.

The film is old, of course, although when I told a friend that (she was born in 1963) it raised some hackles. I meant that the quality of the copy we saw was a little on the jaundiced side. And I told her think how old it would be if made in 1958!

The version on the Roku station was a rebroadcast by NBC News, introduced by Edwin R. Newman with comments from Lucy Jarvis. Newman died in 2010, but I think that Jarvis is still alive. She was a great trailblazer for women in television production, according to The Paley Center for Media. Lucy Jarvis talks about making the film here. She also produced films about the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and the Kremlin.

Of course, watching this has just inspired me to plan another trip to Paris next year. We are looking at dates in March and thinking about renting an apartment for a week. And perhaps I'll finally get my husband INSIDE the Louvre, "The Golden Prison".