La Tour, prends garde! (1958)

La Tour, prends garde! is a French adventure film first released in 1958, directed by Georges Lampin.  The film stars Jean Marais, Eleonora Rossi Drago, Nadja Tiller, Cathia Caro and Liliane Bert.  It has also been released under the title: Killer Spy.  Our overall rating for this film is: mediocre.


La Tour, a member of a troupe of travelling actors, disgraces himself before King Louis XV of France.  To redeem himself he makes a valiant assault on the Austrian army, with whom France is presently at war.  La Tour’s reward is to fight a duel with the Duke of Saint Sever, the man who ordered his earlier flogging.  During the duel, the two men are surprised by a band of Austrian soldiers.  In the ensuing confusion, Saint Sever is killed, stabbed in the back by an ambitious rival.  Before he dies, the Duke implores La Tour to find his illegitimate daughter and ensure she inherits his estate.  La Tour sets off on his mission, realising that he will be blamed for Saint Sever’s death…

Jean Marais stars in this big budget historical fantasy directed by Georges Lampin.  The film’s extravagant production values are not matched by the quality of its script nor its direction, however.  So, whilst the film is visually stunning – particularly the lavish location filming (in Yugoslavia) – it feels a somewhat dry and shallow substitute for a more serious historical drama.  Marais is, as ever, magnificent as the swashbuckling hero, although his romantic pairing with an actress who looks less than half his age appears more than a little suspect.  The film is probably best known for marking the screen debut of a certain Jean-Pierre Léaud, a child actor who would, one year later, star in Francois Truffaut’s Les 400 coups and subsequently become one of the faces most closely identified with the French New Wave.

© James Travers 2004

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