VINCENTE Minnelli's musical Gigi (World, 12.30pm) is the perfect Bank Holiday film, should you be planning a day vegetating on the sofa. It is silly, it is overbaked, it is ludicrously ostentatious, but it is thoroughly enjoyable. Ten minutes into the movie you will have solved the plot. From there on in you can wallow in the frou-frou, the Parisian landmarks and the marvellous costumes.
If you want to be critical, you might say that writers Allan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe simply reworked their milestone My Fair Lady. To an extent that is true; certainly the score is a rather vapid one.
Gigi is based on the Collette novel of the same name and followed in the footsteps of a French film adaptation and the 1951 straight dramatic Broadway production which starred the late and great Audrey Hepburn.
The story concerns a waif (Leslie Caron), who lives in turn-of-the-century Paris with her grandmother (Hermione Gingold). The grandmother seeks to transform Gigi into something akin to a young Elizabeth Taylor, so she can become the mistress of a wealthy sugar cane merchant.
Caron - never the most effortless of waifs - had played the role of Gigi in the London production of the straight stage-play, and here leads the cast (she is dubbed for the singing by Betty Wand) in a contest to see who can be the most French.
The winner, of course, is Maurice Chevalier, who plays Gigi's uncle. His performance will make you feel as though you are gagging on pastry.