Paris Blues

Introduced by Schawn Belston, Amazon MGM Studios Archive

In an underground jazz club in Paris’ bohemian Left Bank, two American musicians, trombonist Ram Bowen (Paul Newman) and saxophonist Eddie Cook (Sidney Poitier), make their living jamming for crowds nightly until their casual affairs with a pair of tourists (Joanne Woodward & Diahann Carroll) develop into something more serious, and their previously stable expat existence is upended. With a return to America on the table, the two men are forced to confront what keeps them in Paris—both the dreams they are striving toward, and the realities they are running from—in director Martin Ritt’s Paris Blues.

Adapted from Harold Flender’s novel of the same name, Paris Blues depicts a postwar world marked by disaffection and discontent; a world on the verge of social and political upheaval, inhabited by people unsure of their place within it. It was Ritt’s socially-conscious approach to the material and its explicit racial themes that likely drew Sidney Poitier to the project (his second collaboration with Ritt, after 1957’s Edge of the City), but the film’s music is thought to be its most timeless and effective element, lent authenticity by Louis Armstrong’s supporting performance as “Wild Man” Moore and Duke Ellington’s Academy Award-nominated score.

Restoration Credits
The 2026 restoration of PARIS BLUES has been achieved in 4K using the 35mm original camera negative as source. The mono audio has been restored using an original optical soundtrack negative.

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