L’Homme de Rio (1964) - film review

French air force pilot Adrien Dufourquet returns to Paris for a week’s leave just before his girlfriend, Agnès, is kidnapped.  In a desperate bid to rescue the woman he loves, Adrien pursues her abductors and ends up on a plane bound for Rio de Janeiro.  Upon his arrival in Brazil, Adrien wastes no time in resuming his search for Agnès and soon discovers why she was kidnapped.  The daughter of a renowned explorer, she alone holds the secret to a lost treasure belonging to an ancient South American civilisation, a treasure which someone will stop at nothing to possess...

Director Philippe de Broca came close to fulfilling a longstanding ambition to make a live action version of Hergé’s Tintin adventures when he made L’Homme de Rio, an energetic adventure-comedy that feels both like a send-up of the early James Bond films and a precursor of Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films.  Although the film was made on a fraction of the budget of a comparable Hollywood offering, it looks impressively like a lavish blockbuster production, thanks to its stunning location photography and some exceptionally well choreographed action sequences.  Only the cheap and cheerful opening titles give the game away.

L’Homme de Rio reunited de Broca with actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, their second collaboration after the popular swashbuckler Cartouche (1962).  The film was to mark an important milestone in Belmondo’s career.  His first out-and-out hit, both at home and abroad, the film not only made Belmondo a major international star but also established the screen persona that would stay with him for the rest of his career.  This was the first occasion when the actor’s penchant for stunt-work was exploited to the full and, under the guidance of professional stuntman Gil Delamare, Belmondo brought to the screen some of the most impressive action stunts ever seen in a French film up until this point.

Partnering Belmondo in this Brazilian adventure romp is a suitably feisty Françoise Dorléac, famously the sister of Catherine Deneuve, whilst the villain of the piece is played with great élan by Jean Servais, the star of Jules Dassin’s film noir masterpiece Du rififi chez les hommes (1955).  Even though all of the characters are little more than comic book caricatures, every member of the cast (Belmondo included) resists the temptation to send up the film, with the result that L’Homme de Rio is a respectable action film punctuated by moments of humour, a far more attractive proposition than those silly James Bond movies that were made in the 1970s.

L’Homme de Rio was a massive box office hit when it was first released in France in 1964, attracting an audience of 4.8 million.  It also fared extraordinarily well on its international release, particularly in the United States where it received some very favourable reviews in the national press.  Overnight, Jean-Paul Belmondo became one of the best known French actors of his generation and he was to remain one of French cinema’s greatest assets for the next two decades - decades which were dominated by a genre for which the actor was particularly well suited, the action-polar.  Bébel had arrived.

© James Travers 2011

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