La Métamorphose des cloportes (1965) - film review

Three small-time crooks – Edmond, Arthur and Rouquemoute – are planning to mount a small-time heist.  To buy the equipment needed for this adventure, they trick notorious art thief Alphonse to lend them some money in exchange for a share in the booty.  The robbery goes seriously awry and Alphonse alone is arrested.  For the next five years, whilst Alphonse stews in jail planning his revenge, his three former associates settle into a respectable life.  Arthur rears racehorses; Edmond runs an institute for Hindus; and Rouquemoute has become an art dealer.  Emerging from prison, Alphonse has just one thought in his head: to crush the life out of these three worthless lice...

La Métamorphose des cloportes is a typically French comedy policier of the kind that was very popular in the mid-1960s.  After the success of Georges Lautner’s 1963 film Les Tontons flingueurs, other directors were keen to exploit the popularity of the comedy-thriller genre, and La Métamorphose des cloportes is perhaps one of the best of examples of its kind.

Screenwriter Michel Audiard and actor Lino Ventura, two of the main reasons for the success of Les Tontons flingueurs, once again apply their talents to a genre that clearly favours them both.  Regarded as the definitive hard man of the French thriller genre in the 1960s and 1970s, Ventura has great charisma and style, and also a very individual penchant for downbeat comedy – all of which makes him indispensable casting for a parody thriller.  Several other notable names figure in the cast list – Pierre Brasseur and Françoise Rosay, two actors with very distinguished filmographies stretching back to the 1920s, and Charles Aznavour, who subsequently became one of France’s most successful pop singers.

Unlike many comedy thrillers of the 1960s, La Métamorphose des cloportes retains its appeal, partly through its seductive, unusually classy visual style, which is both an homage and parody of film noir, and also through its restrained, off-the-wall humour.  Director Pierre Granier-Deferre is reputed for directing some stylish thrillers in the 1970s, but this is unquestionably one of his most inspired works.

© James Travers 2006

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