Is it just me, or is Maurice Chevalier so PERVY?

I agree with you, DryToast. It's sad that today's society sees pedophilia in everything. A man holding hands with a little girl (who might be his niece or daughter) and people think of pedophilia. The words "sleep" and "bed" also bring about those dirty thoughts.
I wish I lived at a more innocent time...

Good eye, DryToast, I was wondering when someone would catch that. "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," indeed! Chevalier was arrested four times for sex with minors, but owing to his celebrity the charges were dropped. That's why his career faded, though.

Exactly! The awesomeness of your simple observation -- retrospectively, of the times -- assures me that not everyone is spooked by all they read and hear, and none of which they've personally witnessed. This blessing comes as great comfort. You're an emotional lifesaver.

That's a little harsh. I saw the movie when it first came out and thought at the time that the Maurice Chevalier character really ought to find something more appropriate to do with his time, but just wrote it off to French culture.

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Rather than being sinister, the little twist at the end is so mild, it makes the entire song seem naive, as opposed to the jaded eyes who see illicit and diseased sexuality at work.

So given that there is nothing offensive in the lyric itself, and nothing offensive in the little visual reference that Chevalier makes, what is the problem here -- aside from the fact that immature people enjoy a witch hunt?

Amen!

This must be where pies go when they die.

@DryToast.

I feel compelled to defend your view. Maurice singing "Thank Heaved for Little Girls" is a masterpiece of musical movies and has nothing to do with pedophilia.

It's really sad and pathetic actually. "Immature people enjoying a witch hunt indeed!"

Good lord, I don't know how so many of you guys and gals can really just be looking the other way at something that's so obvious in the movie. To quote the previous poster, "when it was made it wasn't meant sexually. He was being sweet and grandfatherly, not perverted and a pedophile." It makes it sound like you guys think there was no such thing as sex in the 1950s (much less in the 1890s). The thing that surprises me is that in this apparent equation -- grandfather vs. pedophile -- you all seem to recognize no possibility for a middle ground. Of course Honore is not a pedophile, but at the same time he is not speaking here with "grandfatherly" sensibilities. I suppose if you had only seen that one scene from the entire movie you could read it that way, but you guys must have been asleep all those other times like when Honore said that a 30 year old woman (Eva Gabor) was too old, and referred to another girl saying "she doesn't have many good years left." What, she doesn't have many good years left, in a grandfatherly way? How about when Honore advises Gaston to "stick with the young, and a bit rubs off on you." He was speaking as a grandfather?

So.... who exactly is being "PC" here? What I see is a stupendous inability on the part of the whole group of you, who see yourselves as the film's defenders, to come to terms with the supreme irony and the transgressive wit of that scene. Instead of an extreme interpretation where Honore is a sick pervert, you want to substitute a typical 40s/50s Hollywood archetype of the kindly old grandfather, like Lewis Stone in the "Andy Hardy" movies or Edmund Gwenn's Santa Claus in "Miracle on 34th Street." What a pathetic movie "Gigi" would be if indeed it inhabited either of those sad whitewashed domains. Honore is neither Santa Claus nor is he a pedophile. He has time to reminisce about the past but he has no time to strike up a romance with a woman his age. He is charming and full of the joy of life, but his lifestyle is one that the movie ultimately repudiates when Gaston asks Gigi to marry him. Honore doesn't have a sexual infatuation with small children; as the song makes clear, he is looking forward to their growing up into sexual creatures. But he has no interest in a real long-term relationship and he has no interest in a girl who's grown into a woman. To try to paint him as a kindly grandfather as if it were the only way to defend him from charges of pedophilia is itself the heighth of "PC" folly.

Did I not love him, Cooch? MY OWN FLESH I DIDN'T LOVE BETTER!!! But he had to say 'Nooooooooo'