La Grande frousse (1964)

La Grande frousse is a French comedy thriller film first released in 1964, directed by Jean-Pierre Mocky.  The film is based on a novel by Jean Ray and stars Bourvil, Jean-Louis Barrault, Francis Blanche, Victor Francen and Jean Poiret.  It has also been released under the title: The Big Scare.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


When a homicidal forger, Mickey-le-Bénédictin, goes on the run after evading his execution, Inspectors Triquet and Virgus hasten after him to prevent him from committing any further crimes.  Convinced that the forger will return to the scene of his former exploits, Triquet heads for the provincial town of Barges, whose inhabitants are strangely reluctant to cooperate with him.  The town-dwellers live in constant fear of a mythical beast that roams the area after dark and regard Triquet with a mixture of suspicion and loathing.  In the course of Triquet’s haphazard investigation, people suddenly start to die - first Franqui, who has been spying on his neighbours, then the pharmacist.   Even when Triquet has exposed the beast of Barges as a fake, the killings continue.  Just what terrible secret does this most insular of French towns conceal...?

Probably the best of Jean-Pierre Mocky’s anarchic film comedies, La Grande frousse is a near-perfect example of the comédie policière, a totally unhinged black comedy that merits its classic status.  The film has some striking similarities with the British Ealing comedies of the 1950s - in particular The Ladykillers (1955) - although its director’s intentions are more obviously satirical, mercilessly poking fun at the establishment and the peculiarities of French provincial life.  Whilst the film is uneven and occasionally too silly for words, the gags keep coming, with the ferocity of a hailstone blizzard, some of a hue so black that you are not sure whether to laugh your entire bronchial apparatus out onto the carpet or draft an instant letter of disgust to the League Against Extreme Bad Taste in Film Comedy.  La Grande frousse just escapes being a comedy masterpiece by the merest skin of its razor-sharp satirical teeth.

Jean-Pierre Mocky has a particular knack of attracting big name actors to his films but here he excels himself with a cast of iconic proportions, one that places serious heavyweight performers such as Jean-Louis Barrault and Victor Francen, alongside popular comic actors of the likes of Bourvil and Francis Blanche.   At the time, Bourvil was the most popular comic actor in France and here he gives one of his most memorable performances as the luckless police inspector who leaves a trail of devastation (and corpses) wherever he goes, in a similar vein to Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clousseau (who had recently debuted in the first Pink Panther movie).  As he confronts a mythical beast from the middle ages (in truth a sad man in a silly fish head) and singularly fails to unmask the villain of the piece until most of the dramatis personae have found their way to the mortuary, Bourvil earns his spurs as a comedy hero, even if his walk (an irritating skip-cum-gallop) makes him look like an alien struggling to acclimatise itself to the Earth's gravitional field strength.  Other notable contributions are supplied by Raymond Rouleau, supremely magisterial (and so obviously the villain...) in what looks suspiciously like a tongue-in-cheek reprise of his famous role in L’Assassinat du Père Noël (1941), and Jean Poiret, who deserves some kind of award (and a season ticket for The Rocky Horror Show) for his portrayal of the campest copper (or gingerest gendarme) in Christendom.

La Grand frousse is not only funny (lethally funny in fact), it is also wonderfully atmospheric, as chillingly moody as the creepiest horror film, its oppressive chiaroscuro photography vividly evoking that unmistakable sense of claustrophobia and alienation you experience on entering the local post office of a hermetically closed community that refuses to embrace strangers (i.e. most small towns in France, and Paris).  The legendary cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan brings to the film the same sense of brooding menace that he had previously invested in Georges Franju’s horror classic Les Yeux sans visages (1960), and also something of that film's dark lyrical power.  The location also adds something to the film's distinctive atmopshere.  The film was shot in the typically quaint French town of Salers, in the Auverne region of south-central France.  Not every member of the local community was happy with this intrusion.  One person, a renowned local witch, is said to have put a curse on the film.  When the film was subsequently developed, the negative was found to be impregnated with some inexplicable markings, necessitating that several sequences be reshot.

For its initial release in 1964, the film suffered from poor editing at the hands of its distributors and was not a great success.  When the rights reverted to the film’s author in 1972, Jean-Pierre Mocky reconstructed the film as he intended it, reinserting some cut sequences and giving it the title of Jean Ray’s novel on which it was based, La Cité de l’indicible peur.  On its re-release, the film was far better received than it had been a decade previously and soon became a cult favourite.  Gérard Calvi’s theme song, performed with élan by René-Louis Lafforgue and repeated endlessly throughout the film, is one of the catchiest of any French film - you’ll be humming it for weeks after watching the film and may well require require therapy and/or brain surgery to remove it completely.  How does it go?  "C'est la grande frousse, c'est la grand peur, prenez bien garde à l'inspecteur, le dénommé Simon Triquet... Son père était dans la police, son oncle aussi, même sa nourrice, ah quel destin, ah quel destin...!"  This is Mocky at his scalpel-witted best.

© James Travers 20011

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