L’Homme à la Buick (1968) - film review

Armand Favrot decides to put his erstwhile gangster career firmly behind him when he moves to the small town of Honfleur.   To the locals, he appears to be an upstanding citizen, generously buying tombola tickets and ferrying children to Switzerland for their holidays.  In truth, he continues his trade as a jeweller smuggler to pay for his retirement.  When he falls for the charms of a wealthy widow, Madame Dalayrac, Armand realises that he must raise more money if he is to keep up with her expensive tastes.  Summoning his former partners in crime, he reveals his plan to mount a spectacular jewel robbery in the heart of Paris…

In this film, director Gilles Grangier attempts a happy marriage of the two genres that most define his career: the popular comic farce and the classic French crime-thriller.  The union doesn’t quite work and although the film has some pretty lavish production values it is very much a hit and miss affair.  Not all of the jokes are in the places you’d expect to find them, most of the characters are thin parodies of genre types, and the plot is needlessly over-complicated.  To set against these faults, there is an exceptional cast, headed by the legendary comic Fernandel and the eternally delightful Danielle Darrieux (both of whom give good value for money).   Michael Lonsdale’s camp police inspector is an unexpected treat, although his character is criminally underused.   Whilst the film is unlikely to win any awards for originality or artistic merit, it is mildly entertaining and not as grotesquely silly as some popular French comedies of this period.  The most significant thing about this film is that it marks the final contribution to cinema by Henri Jeanson, who is credited with scripting some of the most memorable films in French cinema history – notably Hôtel du nord (1938) and Fanfan la Tulipe (1952).

© James Travers 2004

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