Recently my husband and I were watching Maurice Chevalier joyfully serenade a bevy of curvaceous fin de siecle beauties in The Merry Widow when I said, "People just don't get him."

My spouse did not even have to ask me who I meant by "people," as he has frequently heard me complain about those who dismiss Chevalier out of hand after seeing him only in the musical Gigi. If I had a dollar for every time I've heard someone say "It gives me the creeps to hear that dirty old man singing about leetle girls," I could probably treat a friend to a festive night at Maxim's. But Chevalier was singing about the beeg girls. He was singing about the promise of the grown woman inherent in the female child—exactly what Louis Jourdan as Gaston sings about in Gigi's title tune.

It is in watching Chevalier in his 1930s films, and hearing him render the songs for which he is famous, that this is as plain and cheering as the smile on monsieur's face. Many of Maurice Chevalier's 1929–1934 films for Paramount—The Love Parade, The Smiling Lieutenant, Love Me Tonight—came out of the tradition of European sex farce, in which the women were depicted as being no less interested in assignation than the characters Chevalier played. Oh, they may have been more manipulative and indirect about it, but if they hadn't, there wouldn't have been a plot!

Some of the songs Chevalier introduced in these quintessential movies are featured on Mr. Paree Himself, the new CD collection culled from a series of transcriptions of Chevalier's 1949 radio show, This is Paris, plus a guest spot Chevalier made on Bing Crosby's Philco Radio Time in 1947. At 60 years old, the singer is in strong, jubilant voice on these, offering affectionate tributes to Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, an entertaining line of patter in his endearing accent, and the general sense of well-being that he always manages to exude.

His trademark "girls" are here—"Louise", and "Mimi", and all the many women who are mentioned within these songs. It is a kick to hear Chevalier's versions of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and "Ballin' the Jack". I think I would have laughed at the thought of the first song's dialect and the second one's slang being rendered in a thick French accent, but somehow it works.

Despite my fondness for the song "You Bring a New Kind of Love to Me", I think my favorite part of the whole CD is Chevalier's soliloquy within "You Can't Buy Happiness". He delightfully dispels the notion that money can't make you happy, and does so quite convincingly!

A more brooding Chevalier is in evidence on "Comme Ci, Comme Ca", but his "Just One of Those Things" is an even more upbeat rendering than usual of a surprisingly bouncy Cole Porter tune about breaking up. He gets the lyrics a bit mixed, but c'est la vie.

The duet with Bing Crosby is great fun. This was the first season in which Crosby experimented with prerecording his program, and though his use of the technique always has sounded rather stilted to my ears, Chevalier and Crosby manage to sound as if they are performing live and ad-libbing their way through a few songs made famous by each of them. I always thought Fred Astaire's was the goofiest vocal impression of Crosby, until I heard Chevalier's take on "Learn to Croon".

This release is one from a series of budget-priced CDs in the Collectors' Choice Music catalogue, featuring radio and transcription performances by artists who generally are underrepresented on compact disc—including Betty Hutton, Gordon MacRae, Janet Blair, and others.

The running time of the CDs in this series clocks in rather short, consistent with their low price. Although the liner notes of Mr. Paree, Himself amount to only one page of text that backs the illustration on the cover, they are well-written and informative. Highly recommended, especially if you are in need of a pick-me-up.