La Grande vadrouille (1966)

La Grande vadrouille is a French war film first released in 1966, directed by Gérard Oury.  The film stars Bourvil, Louis de Funès, Terry-Thomas and Claudio Brook.  It has also been released under the title: Don’t Look Now –.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Summer, 1941.  When their RAF bomber is shot down over France by German artillery, three airmen (two English, one Canadian) parachute out over Paris.  One lands on the scaffold of a genial painter and decorator, Augustin Bouvet.  Another lands on top of a concert hall and is rescued by the irascible but patriotic conductor Stanislas Lefort.  The third airman, nicknamed Big Moustache, ends up in the otter enclosure of a Parisian zoo.   Reluctantly, Augustin and Stanislas agree to honour a rendezvous at the Turkish baths to meet up with Big Moustache, but within no time they themselves become targets of the German soldiers.  Assisted by the daughter of a puppeteer and an anti-German nun, the two unwilling heroes accompany the three airman on a reckless trek across France.  Their only hope is to reach the free zone before they are caught and shot...

La Grande vadrouille represents the absolute pinnacle of mainstream French comedy in the 1960s, a big budget period extravaganza that brought together three of the most popular comic actors of the era - Bourvil, Louis de Funès and Terry-Thomas - and could hardly help being a runaway success.  Attracting an audience of 17.3 million in France, the film held onto its record as the most successful French film for forty years, until Dany Boon’s Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis stole its top-of-the-poll position in 2008 with an audience of 20.5 million.   A classic in the true sense of the word, La Grande vadrouille (released in the US as Don’t Look Now... We’re Being Shot At!) regularly achieves high audiences whenever it is screened on French television and remains one of the best loved and most watched of all French film comedies.  And it is not hard to see just why that is.

What is most striking about La Grande vadrouille is how good it looks.  Compared with most French comedies of this era, which tended to be low budget, studio-bound productions that were little more than badly filmed sitcoms, this one has the feel of a genuine blockbuster, beautifully photographed by Claude Renoir (nephew of the famous director Jean Renoir), with an attention to period detail that rivalled many a contemporary Hollywood war film.  Full-blown action-adventure comedy was a rarity in France, even as late as the 1960s, so La Grande vadrouille was something of a trailblazer, setting high standards for subsequent comedies and generally raising the bar for mainstream French film cinema in general.  This was an era when cinema was struggling hard to compete with television, and so bigger budgets, bigger casts and grander scenarios were very much the order of the day.  Who would pay to watch a dreary sitcom at the cinema when they could watch the same for free on television in the comfort of their own homes?  The phenomenal success of La Grande vadrouille must have come as a huge morale boost to an industry that had good reason to think its days were numbered.

La Grande vadrouille may have broken the mould with its lavish production values and masterfully choreographed set-piece action sequences, but it was not the first French comedy to make light of France’s troubled period of Nazi Occupation.  It had been a decade since agent provocateur Claude Autant-Lara had shown the lighter side of living under the Fascist jackboot in La Traversée de Paris (1956), and since there had been a spate of (generally mediocre) wartime comedies, ranging from Christian-Jaque’s irreverent Babette s’en va-t-en guerre (1959) to Jean Renoir’s more sophisticated Le Caporal épinglé (1962).  La Grande vadrouille was not the first film to mock the Nazis but it does occasionally risk getting snagged on the thorns of controversy with its coded allusions to collaboration and attentism.  More signficantly, it was the first comedy on WWII to be shown at cinemas in Germany.  The success of the film may even have been a factor in the French nation growing to accept the grim realities of the Occupation in the decade which followed its release.

Unlike many subsequent WWII comedies - most notably Jean-Marie Poiré’s Papy fait de la résistance (1983) - La Grande vadrouille has no need to resort to facile national stereotypes (of the tiresome ’Allo, ’Allo ilk) to get the laughs.  In the best tradition of comedy, the humour lies not in the characters, but in the absurd situations they get themselves into - and there is no end of absurd situations in this film.  From a creepily homoerotic encounter in a Turkish baths to a spectacular chase sequence in which our heroes evade capture with (of all things) pumpkins, La Grande vadrouille takes us on the most surreal flights of fancy but never seems to lose its grip on reality.  Not only is it a superb comedy, it is also a pretty respectable action war film, one of the best to have been made in France in the 1960s.  

La Grande vadrouille was directed (with unstinting panache) by Gérard Oury, a former actor who, having directed a few lacklustre genre films, notched up his first box office triumph with Le Corniaud (1965), another ballsy action-comedy featuring Bourvil and Louis de Funès.  Oury was clearly far more influenced by the Hollywood big guns than his New Wave contemporaries, and he had an innate flair for making splashy comedies that the public would want to see (time and again) in their millions, even if some of his films ventured into slightly iffy territory (racial prejudice, international terrorism, etc.).  Oury’s subsequent box office hits include: Le Cerveau (1969), La Folie des grandeurs (1971) and Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob (1973), all of which now occupy an important place alongside La Grande vadrouille and Le Corniaud in the pantheon of French film comedy.  

Although the Bourvil-De Funès double act had only been established in Le Corniaud, the two actors had appeared together in earlier films, some years before De Funès had his big breakthrough and was still relegated to minor supporting roles.  Their first on-screen rencontre was in Gilles Grangier’s Poisson d’avril (1954) and they had shared a memorable scene in La Traversée de Paris.  La Grande vadrouille was the perfect vehicle for both comic actors, allowing them to spar off one another brilliantly with their wildly contrasting comic personas.  The easy-going, avuncular Bourvil makes an effective contrast with the small-minded petit bourgeois De Funès, and the bitter class friction that underpins their characters’ interplay as they try to cope with the worst the Wehrmacht has to throw at them is one of the funniest aspects of the film.   A consummate perfectionist, De Funès spent three months rehearsing the sequence in which he conducts an orchestra through a recital of Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust.  He not only took lessons from a professional conductor but spent whole days refining his movements in front of a mirror; his performance was so convincing that, after a flawless take, the musicians he was conducting spontaneously responded with the warmest of ovations.
 
The sequence which best characterises the edgy De Funès-Bourvil relationship is the one in which the former cons the latter into giving him a piggyback ride (an apt class metaphor if ever there was one).  Incredibly, this scene was not scripted but was improvised by the two actors during the shoot.  One of the most enduring images of the film, the memorable shot of De Funès sitting triumphantly astride Bourvil’s shoulders was used in posters to promote the film and seems to presage the former actor’s ascendancy over the latter, through his later cinematic successes.  Having become firm friends by this stage, De Funès and Bourvil were keen to work together on a third film, but this was not to be.  Bourvil died from cancer in 1970 before he could partner De Funès in La Folie des grandeurs and had to be replaced by Yves Montand.  Just before his death, Bourvil did get to team up once more with the film’s other comic genius, Terry-Thomas, in Marcel Camus’s similarly themed but far less impressive Le Mur de l’Atlantique (1970).  

It was on La Grande vadrouille that Danièle Thompson, the daughter of director Gérard Oury, made her screenwriting debut.  Thompson would work on all of Oury’s subsequent films and later become a director in her own right, making her directorial debut with La Bûche, one of the most popular films of 1999.  This is not the film’s only family connection.  Its well-oiled scenario appears to have been inspired by Robert Stevenson’s American wartime drama Joan of Paris (1942), which starred none other than Michèle Morgan, Gérard Oury’s partner at the time.   Morgan’s son Mike Marshall (the half-brother of actress-director Tonie Marshall) appears in the film, in the role of the Canadian airman Alan McIntosh.

La Grand vadrouille is one of those remarkable films you can watch again and again, and never grow tried of, and, unlike most French comedies, it is readily accessible to a non-French audience (it helps that a large chunk of the dialogue is in English!).  The gags are not crowbarred into the narrative, as is sadly so often the case with action comedies these days, but appear to spring naturally from the plot situations, and this is probably why the film is so unrelentingly funny and has stood the test of time so well - the jokes are spontaneous and mostly take us by surprise.  From hilarious malentendus to outright slapstick of the Mack Sennett variety, La Grand vadrouille covers practically the entire spectrum of comedy, and still manages to be an adrenaline-pumping action romp.  It may have lost its claim to be the film that drew the largest cinema audience in France but it will be a very, very long time before it ceases to be the most fondly regarded of French comedies.

© James Travers 2011

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